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STUDIES IN DREAMS 



STUDIES IN DREAMS 



BY 

MARY ARNOLD-FORSTER 

(MRS. H. O. ARNOLD-FORSTER) 



WITH A FOREWORD BY 

MORTON PRINCE, M.D., LL.D. 

Author of "The Nature of Mind and Human Automatism, 

"The Unconscious," "The Dissociation of a 

Personality," etc. 



jfteto ^otk 

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1921 

All rights reserved 



■A 7 



Copyright, 1920 and 1921, 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



Set up and electrotyped. Published April, 1921. 



©CLA617255 

JUN -8 1921 



TO 

KA 



Digitized by the Internet Archive 
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FOREWORD 

I have been asked by the dreamer of these dreams 
to add a foreword of my own. I do not know that I 
can add anything that will contribute to their inter- 
est, whether in the way of discussion, criticism, or 
interpretation. The author of the book modestly 
makes no claim to be a scientific explorer but only 
to be a recorder of her own dream experiences, who 
has been impelled ' ' to stray a little beyond the prov- 
ince" assigned and "to attempt some partial ex- 
planation of the riddles that are met with. " But the 
reader, I am sure, will find that she has scarcely done 
herself justice in this diffident attitude, for the ac- 
curate recording of observations accurately made is 
the basis of science and requires the development 
and possession of no common talent. Such observa- 
tions are of much more scientific value than a num- 
ber of inadequate theories — inadequate because 
based upon only a selected or limited group of facts. 
Moreover, these pages are rich in sound comments 
and discussions of the recorded phenomena, which 
are suggestive of new problems and points of view, 
and the author offers us particularly a well-consid- 
ered new theory of the mechanism of dreams. A 
considerable number of the observations recorded 
must be regarded as additions to our knowledge and 



viii FOREWORD 

as new data for an adequate interpretation of the 
mechanism of dreams. Besides the recording of her 
own experiences, Mrs. Arnold-Forster sets before 
herself as her main task that of finding out "by ex- 
periment and careful observation all that we can 
learn about the working of the various mental facul- 
ties in the dream state" — reason, memory, will, 
imagination. As the parts played by these mental 
processes obviously bear upon the various theories 
which have been proposed for the explanation of 
dreams, the results of the author's study of her own 
dreams must be regarded as an original contribution 
to the subject. The interesting theory which she 
proposes (Chapter IX) is one that deserves careful 
consideration. The unprejudiced reader who has 
not already accepted one of the current theories of 
dreams will be attracted by the diffidence and free- 
dom from dogmatism of the author, and will study 
these pages with greater open-mindedness from 
knowing that she is thoroughly versed in the mass 
of literature on dreams which has accumulated in 
recent years, and has tested the theories in the light 
of her own observations. Mrs, Arnold-Forster, 
therefore, is no amateur. I venture to think, how- 
ever, that most professional psychologists will not 
share the "respect and natural awe" which, with 
charming modesty, she avows for the "vast library 
of books" in which are embodied the results of the 
so-called scientific investigations which have been 
stimulated by the present-day medical interest in 
dreams. More likely they look upon such "scien- 



FOREWORD ix 

tific" results as — pipe dreams or cigarette dreams. 
The quality of the interest of the reader in this 
book will undoubtedly be largely determined by his 
previous attitude of mind towards dreams and their 
interpretation. If he has a closed mind, has al- 
ready committed himself towards some theory of 
dream mechanism — and I fear many students of 
present-day psychology already have — if he thinks 
he already knows it all, his interest may be hyper- 
critically modified by the limitation of the task which 
the author has set before herself. I am not sure 
that this contribution has not gained by this limita- 
tion. We have theories in plenty of the mechanisms 
by which dreams are excited and worked out by some 
or other part of the mind, but none is wholly satis- 
factory, none, at least, is universally applicable to 
all dreams. We have physiological theories and 
psychological theories : we have theories making use 
of unconscious processes and conscious processes, 
of symbolisms, and double-faced Janus-like proc- 
esses — an underlying latent and a manifest conscious 
process: and we have theories of naughty and dis- 
guised wishes, and a watchful prude of a censor that 
spoils all the fun of dreaming and lets us fulfil our 
concealed wishes only on condition we don't know 
we have what we want, and therefore can't con- 
sciously enjoy forbidden fruit even in dreams: and 
we have theories of haphazard and " trial and error" 
processes, and many more. But all are theories, and 
nothing is proven fact. Some, nevertheless, work 
out very well with certain dreams, and then, when 



x FOREWORD 

we try to apply them to other dreams, they won't 
work. No universally applicable theory has yet 
been invented. I do not know why any one theory 
of dream mechanism should be true for all dreams : 
as well hold that the mechanism of all conscious 
thought is the same ; that, for instance, because some 
of our problems are solved subconsciously, all are; 
that, because some of our antipathies, some likes and 
dislikes, some fears and some kinds of behaviour 
are determined by hidden subconscious motives, all 
are ; or, conversely, that because many or most prob- 
lems are solved consciously, all are ; or that, because 
many motives stand out blatantly in the broad day- 
light of consciousness, none are hidden in the sub- 
conscious; or that, because most behaviour is deter- 
mined by conscious intent or feeling, all is ; or, again, 
because some actions are instinctive and determined 
by inherited mechanisms, that all behaviour is de- 
termined by such performed instincts; and, con- 
versely, that, because most behaviour is due to ac- 
quired dispositions, all is due to such mechanisms; 
and so on. 

The fact is, Mrs. Arnold-Forster hits the nail on 
the head when she says "there are dreams and 
dreams, and we must get rid of the assumption that 
they all resemble each other.* ' This assumption is 
a very common one : in particular it is often assumed 
that a dream implies incongruity, or incoherence, or 
the grotesque, or logical anarchy. Dreams, as the 
author stresses, may not only exhibit orderly imagi- 
nation, and reasoning, and memory, and other quali- 



FOREWORD xi 

ties of the mind, but this imagination, reasoning and 
memory may be highly constructive, ingeniously in- 
ventive, and produce imaginings or romances com- 
parable in structure and sequence of ideas to stories 
of fiction or real life evolved by the same waking 
mind. This seems to be particularly the case with 
the dreams of the author, who therefore delights in 
her dream life and finds an enchanting recreation 
therein after the cares of the day, as the lover of 
novels, who reads into the wee hours of the night, 
finds refreshment from the strain of the day's work. 
Mr. Greenwood (quoted by Mrs. Arnold-Forster) 
finds his dreams of the same high imaginative order 
and takes the same enjoyment in the dreaming of 
them: and so have many others. 

What is still needed, as the author has pointed outj 
is systematic and accurate recording of their dreams 
by many persons, and the correlation of the phe- 
nomena with identical phenomena occurring in cer- 
tain other states of the waking mental life. If this 
were done, we should be surprised to find what a 
great variety of forms and structure dreams have, 
how greatly they differ in type, and in the mental 
processes involved. "We thus should have the ma- 
terial from which we could safely construct theories 
of mechanisms that would satisfy the different types. 
After the collection of this varied material, we could 
then begin, with greater safety, to analyse and in- 
terpret. In some we should find symbolism, in 
others none; in some repressed wishes, in others 
unrepressed wishes, or fears, doubts, and scruples; 



xii FOREWORD 

in some sex urgings, in others the urgings of one 
or more of the other various innate instincts which 
are the prime movers of human behaviour ; in some 
the solution of problems which have baffled our 
waking consciousness, in others the mere illogical 
fantasies of a weak, dissociated extract of our men- 
tal selves; in some the reproduction of memories, 
and living over again in realistic form previous 
actual experiences, in others imaginary episodes or 
apparent super-knowledge constructed out of pre- 
vious information; in some incongruous, grotesque 
phantasmagoria in cinema-like scenes, in others ro- 
mances or well-constructed fantasies requiring for 
their invention a large system of thought and an in- 
telligence and imagination comparable to the waking 
self -consciousness. And in some we should find that 
the dream, as in waking life, is only the manifested 
expression of deeper-lying subconscious processes; 
and in some, probably in most, that it is just what 
it appears to be — nothing more. 

The drawback to such collections, apart from the 
rareness of the capacity to remember and record 
accurately, would be, I fear, the dullness of reading 
them. The emotional tones which give the pleasure 
or induce the anguish of the dream in the dreamer 
cannot be reproduced in a verbal record ; nor do they 
always correspond to the dream action or images, 
and hence no description can reproduce them. They 
are integral elements of the personal self which con- 
tributes them. The study of dream collections 
would appeal only to the psychologist, and then only 



FOREWORD xiii 

to one specially interested in such mental phenom- 
ena. Every one, we can safely say, is not endowed 
with the gift of imagination to dream such delightful 
romances, tales of adventure, and fantasies in gen- 
eral as the gifted dreamer of these dreams, who finds 
in her nightly pilgrimages ''into the enchanted coun- 
try that lies beyond" a release from the toil of the 
day and compensation for "the sad and anxious 
waking hours" that "life brings to all of us." Un- 
doubtedly, as the author tells us, this dream imagina- 
tion has been cultivated, and can be cultivated and 
directed, to a certain extent, by any one who has 
the persistence and desire. But a natively endowed 
and cultured imagination is probably essential as a 
prerequisite for romance of a high order, as it is for 
analogous feats by the waking self. We see what 
is practically the same phenomenon manifested in 
waking life, not by that system of thought called 
the "self" or self -consciousness, but by a shunted- 
orT, dissociated system which has gained its liberty 
and acquired independent activity. 

Such a system is commonly called subconscious, 
but it is subconscious only because the "self" is still 
awake. Let the ' ' self " go to sleep, or be put to sleep 
by some hypnotic or other device, and the shunted- 
ofr" system, escaping from its subterranean prison, is 
now dominant, is indeed a self, free to romance as 
it pleases. But before, while still shut-up, or per- 
haps it were better expressed shut-out, of the aware- 
ness of the self -consciousness, it was free to indulge 
in imaginings without much restraint, much as the 



xiv FOREWORD 

prisoners confined and forgotten in the French Bas- 
tille were free to indulge their imagination in ro- 
mances thongh other liberty was denied them. I 
have quite a collection of written romances, written 
by a subconscious self while within its own Bastille, 
and songs and music and the invention of a strange 
new logistic language have not failed to find a mode 
of expression. True subconscious dreams they are, 
fabricated by a newly constellated mental system 
that was reconstructed out of the self-conscious or 
personal system — out of the jetsam and flotsam of 
conscious experiences; the discarded, or forgotten, 
or repressed memories, wishes, ideas, and imagin- 
ings. 

I am unable to see that such a system and its fabri- 
cations differ in principle from the "Dream Mind," 
as Mrs. Arnold-Forster aptly calls it, and its fabri- 
cations. Both may, and at times do, have their own 
respective subconscious processes butting in, modi- 
fying or determining their dreams. 

Furthermore, both kinds of dreams can be culti- 
vated, directed, and to a large extent controlled. 
(Mrs. Arnold-Forster has shown how she has learned 
to "control" her own dreams, and I may add to hers 
the testimony of experimentally controlled dreams 
in one of my subjects by suggestion even to the ex- 
tent of directing the theme of the dream.) 1 Simple 
commonplace subconscious writings, the vaporings 
of the ouija board, the so-called trance state and the 
fabrications of spiritualistic "mediums" may be, 

i "The Unconscious," The Macmillan Co., p. 197. 



FOREWORD xv 

and generally are, nothing more than ' ' subcon- 
scious " day-dreams, manifestations of subconscious 
memories identical in principle with normal noc- 
turnal dreams. These subconscious dreams, it is 
well known, can be cultivated ; which means that out 
of almost any material of the mind — memories, emo- 
tional impulses and instincts, acquired dispositions, 
etc. — a self-functioning system can be constellated 
and educated into a subconscious system manifest- 
ing itself in day-dreams. It is common experience 
that the more such manifestations are practised and 
encouraged to become a habit, the more readily they 
occur and the more highly developed becomes the 
intelligence of the system. 

I mention this as only one illustration of the data 
which can be obtained from abnormal and experi- 
mental psychology, for the understanding of dream 
processes. I doubt if there is a single phenomenon 
observed in dreams, or peculiarity of the work of the 
dream mind, that is not also to be found in other 
conditions than sleep. I mean conditions, whether 
artificially produced or the abnormal resultant of 
intrinsic psychological processes, where the mind is 
dissociated as it is in sleep. By correlating dream 
phenomena with analogous phenomena found in 
these other conditions and studying the mechanisms 
and essential characteristics of the abnormal and 
artificial groups, particularly by the experimental 
method, we can obtain an insight into and under- 
standing of the normal dream mind. The study of 
abnormal psychology — including its variant pro- 



xvi FOREWORD 

duced by artifice — has thrown more light on the 
workings of the normal mind than all the centuries 
of academic studies of the latter. 

Mrs. Arnold-Forster directs attention to certain 
characteristics of memory and imagination in 
dreams (Chapter V). The former is remarkable 
for the wealth and distinctness of detail with which 
former scenes and experiences are reproduced; in- 
deed, it may be, visualised with a vividness equal to 
reality. Even momentary experiences which orig- 
inally were merely fugitive impressions, casually 
attended to, may reappear in wonderful detail and 
distinctness as the material of dreams. 

This feat of memory is not peculiar to dreams, 
but may be correlated with the same phenomenon 
manifested by the trance mind and other dissociated 
states of consciousness. 1 In "crystal visions" we 
have it in a more or less isolated form. Likewise 
the heightening of the imagination and its freedom 
from the restrictions of time and space, which Mrs. 
Arnold-Forster interestingly dwells upon, find their 
analogues in dissociated states of mind other than 
sleep. It would be easy to cite examples of the day- 
dreamer or trance-dreamer in whose fantasies "dis- 
tance is annihilated" and centuries passed over in 
the twinkling of an eye. As in normal dreams, the 
soul may seem to leave the body and hover in space 
or be transported to another sphere — celestial or 
cosmic. 

In similar fashion I might point out that in such 

i "The Unconscious," Section II. 



FOREWORD xvii 

states are found the analogues of other dream phe- 
nomena, such as symbolisms, the solution of prob- 
lems — mathematical and personal — literary mani- 
festations of creative imagination, ascribed by Eob- 
ert Louis Stevenson to his "Brownies" somewhere 
beneath or outside the dream mind, the doubling of 
the conscious self (manifested by the activity of a 
second consciousness, or the " Guide" in the author's 
dreams — Chapter XIII), defence reactions, visions, 
and other hallucinations. 

So, though normal dreams are of value for the 
light they throw on the phenomena of abnormal 
psychology, still more the manifold and varied data 
of the latter, the larger field and subject to experi- 
mentation, give an understanding of the former. 
This is the reverse of the point of view of the 
Freudian psychology. The latter subjects itself to 
the errors and fallacies necessarily arising from the 
acceptation of, and dogmatic adherence to, a theory 
which is true of only particular types of dreams, and 
therefore limited in its applications. 

Not the least interesting as well as novel of the 
dream phenomena recorded by the author are those 
of "dream control" and flying dreams. The fact 
that Mrs. Arnold-Forster has succeeded in con- 
trolling her dreams, at least to the extent of pro- 
hibiting unpleasant dreams, and teaching herself to 
fly, will be a novel contribution to most students. 
Both phenomena have interesting corollaries: the 
former 'involves the implication of the principles of 
doubling of consciousness and the "censor," and the 



xviii FOREWORD 

latter of dissociation of all sensory impressions in- 
cluding what is known as coenesthesia, or the organic 
sensations streaming from the viscera and other 
parts of the body. At least so flying dreams can 
be explained. If we assume that all such sensations 
are completely dissociated from the dream mind, 
so that the latter become pure thought and images 
(for there is evidence that during ordinary sleep 
such impressions are still received), we have a men- 
tal condition suitable for the creative imagination 
to fabricate the illusion of flying, untrammelled by 
any conflict with sensory impressions of reality. 
Mrs. Arnold-Forster, herself, has apparently experi- 
enced such a dream without the flying illusion, judg- 
ing from her description (p. 151). Such complete 
dissociation of all consciousness of the body finds its 
analogue, as I have observed, in a waking dissociated 
state, in which the subject describes herself as just 
" thought in space" without a body. 

Given such a dissociation, it would theoretically 
only require a creative imagination with vivid image- 
ry to fabricate the illusions or hallucinations of ob- 
jective flying. The mind is capable of creating al- 
most any kind of hallucination even to the extent of 
shaking hands with an imaginary ' ' spirit, ' ' provided 
it is not contradicted by the conflicting awareness 
of reality. 

It is insisted by those who hold certain theories 
regarding the mechanism of dreams, particularly by 
the school of psycho-analysts, that their theories 
are ''purely inductive, being built up" (as a brilliant 



FOREWORD xix 

expounder writes) "step by step on the basis of 
actual experiences without the introduction of any 
a priori speculative hypotheses." Conceding this, 
and disregarding the fact that many of the alleged 
facts of experience are actually not facts but inter- 
pretations of facts, it still remains true that the 
same can be said for contending theories. Each is 
an inductively reached conclusion. The explana- 
tion of such differing theories is that each is based 
on different facts of experience. All theories as 
well as hypotheses of science hold good only until 
newly discovered facts require reconsideration and 
new explanations. Thus the older theories of atoms 
and the ultimate nature of matter held good until the 
discovery of new facts required a re-examination 
of the theories and a new formulation of conceptions 
in terms of electrons and electricity. And so with 
the biological theories which in consequence of the 
discoveries of Darwin and Mendel had to be chucked 
overboard or recast. 

The claim for any theory of dreams based on its 
having been preached inductively cannot be very im- 
pressive. Mrs. Arnold-Forster brings to our atten- 
tion types of dreams which she finds herself unable 
to fit in with present-day fashionable theories. It 
is interesting to note that after subjecting her 
dreams to self psycho-analysis she fails to find that 
they substantiate the Freudian theory that all 
dreams are symbolic, and still more "that they are 
all symbols of repressed desire" — and particularly 
sex wishes. "Without denying the occurrence of 



xx FOREWORD 

symbolism, according to her interpretation this sym- 
bolism is for the most part "of a simple and direct 
nature relating the dream to some mood that I have 
experienced, or some problem that I have met with, 
and it is often fairly easy to trace this idea which 
the dream represents in an allegorical form. In 
this modified sense it seems evident that many 
dreams are symbolical/ ' 

Mrs. Arnold-Forster, as a student of Freud and 
his followers and thoroughly grounded in the 
Freudian literature, recognises that the true psycho- 
analyst would not be content with such an interpre- 
tation; and that, according to the Freudian theory, 
it is impossible to be one's own psycho-analyst be- 
cause of the self-censorship exerted by the mind 
against such revelations — shall we say against fac- 
ing oneself and the hidden truths of self. For my 
part I am much more impressed by Mrs. Arnold- 
Forster 's simple interpretations of her dreams (of 
which she gives illustrations), perhaps because they 
fit in with my own studies, than I am with those in- 
terpretations to which they are exposed by the 
Freudian theory (as the author of these dreams fully 
realises). Surely the wider and more intensive our 
experience the more must we sympathise with the 
plea expressed in these pages "for the exercise of 
sober judgment and common sense in our study of 
this subject and the conclusions we form." 

To those engaged in the study of the purely 
psychological problems involved in dreams, the au- 
thor's conception of the mental mechanisms by which 



FOREWORD xxi 

dreams are constructed will be of interest (Chapter 
IX). Mrs. Arnold-Forster proposes an explanation 
of dream construction which is as ingenious as it 
is simple. The mechanism is that of association of 
ideas with the co-operation of the imagination. 
Illustrations of how this mechanism works are given 
in two specific dreams recorded. The apparent 
incoherence and inconsecutiveness of many dreams 
is attributed to the failure of memory after waking 
to recall the connecting links necessary to make the 
dream coherent. In dream building, if I understand 
the theory correctly, one idea calls up another by 
successive association — free association, unham- 
pered by critical and discriminating judgment, which 
in the normal process of thinking rejects those asso- 
ciated ideas which are not acceptable or germane 
to the subject in hand. The dream imagination, 
then seizes upon certain elements in the associated 
idea, intensifies and objectifies them in imagery by 
which, for instance, objects are vividly visualised. 
Thus, in one dream, a winding path in a landscape 
suggests by association a railroad, which is at once 
visualised also in the landscape. The two crossing 
each other suggests a railroad crossing, which is in 
turn visualised ; then follows the idea of danger from 
a possible approaching train, and, presto ! the sound 
of such an onrushing train is heard; and so on, one 
association calling up another to be vividly repre- 
sented in images and worked by imagination into a 
connected story, the images suggesting thoughts and 
vice versa. The whole is very much like the process 



xxii FOREWORD 

of certain types of thinking carried on when awake 
by day, ' ' only at night the imagination is not fettered 
by the discipline which restrains our wandering 
thoughts from following too eagerly in the random 
track of every chance thought or suggestion. The 
imagination in sleep, unchecked in this way, can de- 
vote itself to perfecting each successive image that 
arises, giving life and reality to each in turn, meta- 
morphosing them often, and constantly adding new 
facts and fresh touches to the pictures which are its 
creation." 

It is curious and may be interesting to note that 
Mrs. Arnold-Forster's theory is supported by the 
testimony of a co-conscious personality which I had 
occasion to study. It is well known that a number 
of cases, in which a secondary co-conscious personal- 
ity claimed to be awake while the principal person- 
ality was dreaming, have been observed. In the 
Beauchamp case the co-conscious personality, ob- 
serving the dreams as they occurred, testified that 
during sleep sensory stimuli (sounds, the touch of 
the bed-clothes, etc.) are received and " 'make sen- 
sory images or impressions in the same way as in 
the daytime. ' These weave themselves into dreams, 
but they also recall memories of what she has seen 
and heard and read, in fact everything that she has 
ever been conscious of, so that in this way they 
arouse connected dreams." 1 

This theory of the dream mechanism which Mrs. 
Arnold-Forster proposes will probably be regarded 

i "The Dissociation of a Personality," p. 329. 



FOREWORD xxiii 

by psychologists as one of the most important of 
the contributions contained in her book. It is, as 
she points out, in entire opposition to the Freudian 
conception, leaving ' ' entirely out of account the sort 
of hidden meaning that the psycho-analyst finds in 
dreams," as well as the symbolism and unconscious 
sex wishes. In other passages, however, the author 
fully recognises that there may be dreams, especially 
those of morbid persons, to which the Freudian 
theory applies. She has only to do with her own 
experiences. I, for one, am strongly inclined to be- 
lieve that her theory is a sound interpretation at 
least of a certain type of dream, and may, perhaps, 
govern the majority of dreams. Probably Mrs. 
Arnold-Forster will agree that in other types less 
emphasis should be placed on the associative process 
and more on the creative imagination as contrasted 
with what, perhaps, I may call the passive imagina- 
tion, the slave of associated ideas: the creative 
imagination thinks out, reasons, foresees, arranges 
and composes according to a conceived plan, and is 
not the slave of associated ideas. 

In some of the dreams recorded by the author, 
flying dreams for instance, it seems to me that the 
creative imagination is conspicuous and dominates 
the associative process. Certainly there are dreams, 
as might be illustrated from my own collection (not 
personal experiences), in which there is an argu- 
ment, the end is foreseen and the whole is a well- 
worked-out story or allegory. No associative proc- 
ess alone could have produced such logical coherence. 



xxiv FOREWORD 

In such dreams the motivating dispositions which 
have determined the theme and inspired the creative 
imagination are another matter and are to be 
searched for in the antecedent conscious life of the 
individual. 

I am influenced in this notion by what I conceive 
to be the analogues of night-dreams, namely, the 
fantasies of other dissociated states — day-dreaming 
and subconscious dreaming. In these two condi- 
tions I have observed dreams substantially inden- 
tical with those occurring during sleep, but although 
associated ideas may have suggested the motives 
inspiring the theme and otherwise been factors, the 
creative imagination has worked as it does in the 
composition of romance. I have already referred 
to this phenomenon. The fact is that all depends 
upon that organisation of the dissociated mental 
systems which is called by Mrs. Arnold-Forster the 
dream mind, whether functioning when asleep, when 
awake, or when subconscious. When these systems 
are so highly organised as to be capable of reason, 
imagination and will, and when they include the so- 
called instincts — when, in other words, they consti- 
tute an " Intelligence' J — they are capable of working 
in a way comparable to that of the waking intelli- 
gence. But when the senses are eliminated, and 
when therefore cognition of reality is also eliminated 
— as in sleep — there is necessarily a corresponding 
limitation of that adjustment and correlation of 
thought to reality which is one of the essential quali- 
ties of dreams. Undoubtedly the dream mind, like 



FOREWORD xxv 

all dissociated systems, can be educated into a highly 
organised intelligence. This seems to have been 
the case, I venture to think, with the dream mind of 
the author as well as with that of some of the re- 
corders of dreams cited in this book. 

From this point of view there must be as many 
different types of dreams as there are types of or- 
ganised mental systems : even the Freudian mechan- 
isms, of winch I believe I have seen examples, 1 
should occur. 

As Mrs. Arnold-Forster says, "dreams are not 
all alike, but are as manifold in their nature as are 
the thoughts and imaginations of men"; and, I may 
add, dreams vary not only in their nature but also 
in their mechanisms, just as do the mental systems 
of human personality, whether they be mutilated and 
dissociated or unmutilated and complete. 

Morton Prince. 

Boston, U. S. A. 



i "The Mechanism and Interpretation of Dreams," Journal of Ab- 
normal Psychology, vol. v. No. 6 (1911). 



PREFACE 

We are somewhat more than ourselves in our sleeps, and the 
slumber of the body seems to be but the waking of the soul. It is 
the litigation of sense, but the liberty of reason; and our waking 
conceptions do not match the fancies of our sleeps. — Sir Thomas 
Browne, Religio Medici, xi. 

The following slight studies dealing with certain 
dream problems have been written from a series of 
notes, in which dreams and certain experiments in 
dreaming have been more or less regularly recorded 
during a long period of years. If it is asked what 
they have to offer that is new on a subject on which 
so much has been already written, the answer must 
be that we are even now only at the beginning of 
this study, that many problems concerning dreams 
and concerning the border state that lies between 
sleeping and waking are still to be solved, and that 
some of these have as yet hardly been touched on at 
all in the literature of dreams. There are many 
aspects of these questions which can only be very 
imperfectly dealt with by an unscientific observer 
whose want of technical knowledge is a grave dis- 
advantage in writing on a subject to which so much 
learning has been devoted, yet I believe that there 
is room in this fascinating study not only for the 
philosopher and the psychologist, but also for the 



xxviii PREFACE 

unlearned but faithful recorder of personal expe- 
rience. Our dreams are the most individual of all 
our experiences, and we each approach them from 
a separate standpoint of our own. Psychology is 
the science of individual experience, and the facts 
that are eventually sifted and weighed in its labora- 
tories must first be gathered by humble gleaners in 
many widely scattered fields. 

The plea made in this book that more of us should 
learn to watch and record accurately the facts of our 
own dream experience is made, not only because of 
the constantly increasing value to science of a fuller 
knowledge of the working of the dream mind, but 
also because I am sure that those who follow this 
study and learn to remember more of their own 
dream life, will find themselves amply rewarded. 
Life brings to all of us sad and anxious waking 
hours, and to most men it brings days of monotonous 
labour ; but to every one, whatever the sorrow or the 
toil of the day may be, night should bring release. 
When we enter the country of dreams we are not 
only liberated from the bondage of labour, but 
shackles are loosed which by day keep the imagina- 
tion tied to earth. Only in sleep the imagination is 
set at liberty and is free to exercise its fullest pow- 
ers. Sleep which brings us our dreams fulfils the 
eternal need within us, the need of romance, the need 
of adventure ; for sleep is the gate which lets us slip 
through into the enchanted country that lies beyond. 
We give too little heed to the nightly miracle of our 
dreams. Long hours are spent by us in dreaming 



PREFACE xxix 

sleep, during which we are absorbed in a life which 
is for the most part forgotten or ignored by our 
waking consciousness. We speak of it so rarely to 
each other that we know hardly anything about each 
other's dream life, and many things combine to 
make us curiously ignorant and forgetful even of 
our own. For want of interest in dreams, or merely 
because we have never learned how to retain these 
fugitive impressions, they vanish when we wake as 
mist vanishes in sunlight. Nothing fades more 
quickly than these memories, and unless some 
method is acquired by which we can hold them fast 
they are lost ; but if a more alert interest were once 
aroused this need not happen, and we need not so 
often lose the recollection of all that has filled the 
sleeping hours. As we learn to use more intelli- 
gently the instruments of mind and body that are 
ours, our interest is quickened in the processes of 
dreaming, and in the working of the mind in sleep. 
Such quickened observation means for us the height- 
ening of consciousness, the becoming aware of new 
experience — and "to become aware of new experi- 
ence is one of the thrills life gives us." * A twofold 
pleasure then becomes ours: the interest that the 
study of dreams gives us and the delight of dream 
adventures, a delight that I have discovered, can be 
greatly extended and perfected by learning how to 
dream well. Amongst the records of dreams that 
have made the foundation of this book, a consider- 
able number are notes of experiments which were 

i Stephen Graham, "A Tramp's Sketches." 



xxx PREFACE 

made to find out to what extent the control of our 
dreams lies within our power; how, for instance, 
dreams of distress can be checked or banished, and 
how far the art of happy dreaming can be cultivated. 
This question of dream control does not, as far as I 
know, come within the scope of other books. I have 
found it a fascinating path of enquiry, and perhaps 
other lovers of dreaming may be willing to find out 
a way along similar hitherto unmapped roads. In 
this company of dream lovers and dream students 
there are very likely explorers who have already 
travelled much further than I have done, whose in- 
vestigations have been more thorough, and who 
might, if there were a clearing house of dream 
knowledge, bring it their stores of valuable expe- 
rience. 

By rights, perhaps, the task of an unscientific re- 
corder of dreams should be simply to explore — to 
record his experiences in the dream state ; leaving it 
to science to explain the whys and wherefores of 
what has been observed. But it is very difficult for 
one who has dreamed much, and thought much, and 
read much, about dreaming not to stray a little be- 
yond the proper province of the recorder, and not 
to attempt some partial explanation of some of the 
riddles that are met with. Part, at least, of the ex- 
tensive literature of psychology must be studied 
before we can attempt to formulate any answers to 
these questions, and as our reading extends the com- 
plexity of the problems before us deepens. 

Personal experience seems often to contradict 



PREFACE xxxi 

widely accepted theories of dream construction and 
origin ; the truth being that dreams are of such infi- 
nite variety that no theory of their mechanism, even 
when formulated by the greatest of teachers, will 
adequately account for the whole of this wide field of 
human experience. 

In order to use the language of science correctly, 
the training of science is needed, and many pitfalls 
lie in the way of the student. One such pitfall is 
met with at the very outset. Scientific critics have 
come to no agreement as to the term that shall be 
used to express the "mind" or "self " which appears 
to operate in dreams. The existence of such a 
"self" or "mind" as distinct from the normal mind 
is indeed a matter of dispute and is accepted only 
as a possible working hypothesis for the purposes of 
enquiry. The expression "unconscious mind" is 
objected to as being a contradiction in terms ; and the 
writer who, avoiding it, reverts to the word "sub- 
conscious," finds that this gives even less satisfac- 
tion. An apology must therefore be made at once 
for the use throughout these pages of the expression 
"dream mind," an expression which is no less 
"woolly," no less unsatisfactory than the others, 
and which equally evades grave fundamental diffi- 
culties, its only merit being that, as it makes no pre- 
tensions to belong to the vocabulary of science, it 
does not suggest the possession of scientific knowl- 
edge to which I can lay no claim. 

This little book, which is too slight to take a place 
amongst the more learned books about dreams, will 



xxxii PREFACE 

fulfil the object with which it was written if it suc- 
ceeds in showing something of the attractiveness of 
this study, and if it reminds us of the measure, too 
often overlooked, that is added by our dreams to the 
sum of life's happiness. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTEE PAGE 

Foreword by Dr. Morton Prince vii 

Preface xxvii 



Room in this study for lay observers and recorders as 
well as for scientific investigators. Gharm of dreams 
and of their study. Psychology the science of individ- 
ual experience. Need of a clearing house of dreams. 
Question of dream-control apparently outside the scope 
of other books. Difficulty for lay observers in use of 
scientific terms. 

I Introductory 1 

Growth of interest in this study. Scientific attitude 
in the nineteenth century. Difference of present atti- 
tude. Teaching of Freud and his followers. Bergson. 
F. Greenwood. Methods of the dream mind. What 
faculties are active in dreams? Do any of these fac- 
ulties change their character in the dream state ? Does 
our control over our thoughts wholly cease? 

II Dream Control 22 

Desirability of some form of dream control. Bad 
dreams of many kinds. Dream control established by 
means of a formula. Charles Lamb and dreams of 
fear. Children's bad dreams. Richard Rolle the Her- 
mit. Amulets and charms. Dream control considered 
from the point of view of psycho-analysts. 

III Flying Dreams 37 

Further control of dreams. Voluntary dreaming. Ex- 
tension of powers of voluntary dreaming by means of 
a second formula. Experiments. Flying dreams in 
war-time. 

IV Dream Recording 52 

Memory as a dream recorder. Methods of remember- 
ing and recording dreams. Difficulty in case of dreams 
of changing identity. Early morning dreams. Epic- 
tetus's warning to dreamers. An apology. 

xxxiii 



xxxiv CONTENTS 

OHAI'TEB PAGH 

V Dream Memory, Dream Imagination and Dream 

Reason 67 

Memory as dream builder. Imagination as dream ar- 
chitect. World of dreams still the familiar world 
known to us — but laws of time and space annihilated. 
Examples. Operation of reason in dreams. Good rea- 
soning producing unsatisfactory results because dream 
reason is imperfectly supplied with necessary facts. 
Arguments in dreams. 

VI The "Super-Dream" 83 

Nature of the "super-dream." Imagination undergoes 
a dream change. All faculties working at their high- 
est capacity. Condorcet. Nevil Story-Maskelyne and 
others. H. Fabre. R. L. Stevenson. A novelist of to- 
day. 

VII Symbolism in Dreams, and the Significance of 

Dreams in Tradition 93 

Theory of symbolic nature of dreams in modern psy- 
chology. Morton Prince's definition of dreams as "the 
symbolical expression of almost any thought." Censor 
theory. Psycho-analysis. Examples of allegorical 
dreams symbolising thoughts or moods which had oc- 
cupied the mind by day. Ancient belief in the sym- 
bolic and prophetic character of dreams, and in dreams 
as channels of Divine communications with men. 
Some ancient and modern superstitions. 

VIII Dream Places 102 

Dream countries — Mr. E. M. Martin. Dream houses. 
Faithfulness of dream memory. De Quincey's Easter 
dream. Elia — Recurrent place dreams. Rudyard Kip- 
ling. My friend's story. 

IX Dream Construction 113 

Comparison between dreams and wandering day 
thoughts. Construction of dream story. In dreams 
the thing thought of visualised — made objective. Con- 
secutiveness — reasonableness of dream story depends 
on connecting links which are easily forgotten. Ex- 
amples of dream construction. 

X Sense Impressions in Dreams 122 

"Sensorial" and "psychic" dreams. Part played by 



CONTENTS xxxv 

CHAPTER , . PAGB 

sensations in dreams. Havelock Ellis quoted. Flying 
dreams not affected by bodily position. Dreams af- 
fected by temperature of the body. Colour sense in 
dreams. Senses of smell and taste. 

XI Borderland State 134 

Transition state between waking and sleeping de- 
scribed. Two stages: 

(a) Earlier stage furthest removed from sleep. 

(b) Later stage nearest to border-line of sleep. 
Earlier stage — State of quiet. Curious experiences in 
this state. Possibility of telepathic communication by 
channels other than those of the senses. Belief that 
such communications may take place between the liv- 
ing and the dead. Sir O. Lodge. S.P.R. investiga- 
tions. Distinction between experiences in dream state 
and in borderland state. State of quiet. Analogy 
with hypnotic state suggested. Also analogy with 
condition necessary to artist's creative work. 

XII Borderland State 150 

Later stage of transition state — nearest to sleep. Vi- 
sions seen in this state of the same material as our 
dreams. Approaching and crossing the border-line of 
sleep. Simultaneous working of normal and dream 
mind perceived. Intercepted messages. Crossing 
strands of thought. Heightened sensitiveness to sense 
impressions. 

XIII The Actors in Dreams — "The Dream Guide" . . 160 

Nature of the personages who play their parts in our 
dreams. How do they sustain their roles in dramatic 
dreams and dreams of argument? The "Guide" in my 
dreams. Belief that these actors are the creation of 
the dream mind. Consciousness of dual personality. 
Dreams of the dead ... a different order of experi- 
ence from experience in borderland state. 

XIV Moral Sense in Dreams 173 

Differences between moral sense in dreams and in nor- 
mal life. Absence of sense of responsibility. Other 
differences. Dreams of anger, an experiment in dream 
control. Teaching of the Freudian school of psycho- 
analysts. Dream control an ansAver to the theory that 
the province of dreams lies wholly outside our control. 



STUDIES IN DREAMS 



CHAPTER I 



INTKODUCTOKY 



No process or transaction of the mind has engaged so much 
attention for so many centuries as our dreaming when we sleep. 
Long before there was any thinking about thought, there was 
thinking about dreams. — F. Greenwood. 

From the earliest dawn of history and legend we 
know that men have dreamed and have told their 
dreams. From as remote a past interpreters were 
found ready to explain the significance of dreams; 
but it is only within the last quarter of a century 
that the light of modern research has been turned 
fully on to their study, and that, in place of the 
soothsayers of old, men of science of all nations 
have begun to analyse the frail stuff of which our 
dreams are made. 

During the lifetime of a generation the way in 
which the subject is regarded has totally changed. 
To have ventured fifty years ago to write a book 
about dreams would have required moral courage, 
for the subject was looked upon as unworthy the con- 
sideration of serious people. To write on it to-day 
also requires courage, but of a wholly different kind. 
It is formidable now only because of the number and 



2 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

the learning of the books that are already written 
about it. This change of attitude is very noticeable 
if the literature of dreams in the nineteenth century 
is considered. Scientific men were still absorbed in 
the triumphs of that wonderful age of discovery in 
the physical world, and had hardly begun to find out 
how great was the work awaiting science in the field 
of psychology. Many of them still regarded psy- 
chology with a certain suspicion, and had not recog- 
nised that any purpose useful to science could be 
served by the study of the unconscious or semi- 
conscious mind. In every generation the fields of 
knowledge have had to be widened and extended 
so as to cover new investigations, and only too often 
the mandarins of science have tried to bar the way 
of the explorer, and have condemned the impulse to 
push out into new regions of thought. It was not 
until recent years that investigation of certain secrets 
of man's personality, by means of the revelation of 
the mind in sleep, began to attract the attention of 
men of science, and that this new study began to 
throw light upon some of the difficult problems that 
confront the physician in dealing with the human 
nerves and brain. 

It is no longer true, as it was when people began 
to study and to write about dreams in the last cen- 
tury, that the science of medicine approaches such an 
enquiry as this in a spirit of simple materialism. 
The interest of medical science is no longer "nar- 
rowed down into a predetermination to believe in 
the dissecting knife, the microscope, and the galvanic 



INTRODUCTORY 3 

battery, as the only interpreters of man to himself." 
No one would rest content to-day with the explana- 
tion given by Dr. Benjamin Richardson in a course 
of health lectures delivered in the " eighties," when 
he told his hearers to banish from their minds the 
idea that there was anything in dreams that was not 
to be explained by purely physical causes. He 
showed how dreams arose from disturbances com- 
municated to the brain by the system of nerves, act- 
ing much as a telegraph wire acts, which inform the 
brain of the existence of local trouble or distress in 
some part of the body. Such perturbations of the 
brain, when they occur during sleep, occasion our 
dreams ; but the lecturer went no further and would 
allow no other explanation of the mystery of dream- 
ing than the purely bodily one. There entered into 
his definition of dreams nothing that could throw 
any light upon the working of the imagination, the 
memory, or any of the other faculties of the mind in 
sleep— he did not, it would seem, even see how much 
his explanation left unexplained. Scientific thought 
has moved very far from this standpoint. Some of 
the great physicians are devoting themselves to 
special branches of medical psychology; they have 
come to realise the immense, the almost incalculable, 
power of the human mind over the body, and are 
therefore ready to study every manifestation of the 
mind and its subtle processes ; and a wise physician 
writing to-day tells us frankly that the medicine of 
the future will have to take ever fuller and fuller 
account of aspects of human nature which the medi- 



4 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

cine of yesterday would have dismissed as mere 
emotionalism and as wholly outside its province. If 
it is true, as M. Bergson believes, "that the principal 
task of psychology in this century will be to explore 
the secret depths of the unconscious, and that in this 
science discoveries will be made rivalling in impor- 
tance the discoveries made in the preceding century 
in the physical and natural sciences, ' ' then it is prob- 
able that the observations of each one of us, useless 
as these would be if they simply remained individual 
notes, may have a real value when they form part 
of the accumulating sum of the recorded facts of 
man's experience, from which science will at last be 
able to formulate laws that are at present unknown. 
We may need for this purpose a "Clearing House 
of Dreams," where there may be collected the ex- 
periences of many men and women trained to record 
as accurately as possible their observations of 
dreams and of other subtle processes of the mind 
and of the subconscious mind. If science is ever to 
make real progress in understanding much that is 
now inexplicable with regard to these uncharted 
regions, it must be furnished with ample materials, 
and materials drawn from widely different sources 
and embodying the experiences of very many people. 
It seems important that these records, upon which 
science may have eventually to base its conclusions, 
should not be drawn exclusively, or even in a large 
proportion, from the records of the physician's con- 
sulting-room. Much as we owe to the work of phy- 
sicians who have faithfully pursued this study, 



INTRODUCTORY 5 

who have seen in it the possible means of solving 
some of the hardest problems that a doctor has to 
meet, and who carry forward the science of mind- 
healing hand in hand with that of the healing of the 
body, yet the physician starts at a disadvantage 
in the study of dreams or of other little-understood 
mental processes. He will be able, no doubt, in his 
consulting-room to get together a number of relevant 
and interesting facts, but it is likely that far too 
small a proportion of his observations will be derived 
from the experiences of perfectly healthy and nor- 
mal men and women. "They that are whole have 
no need of the physician, but they that are sick." 
The mental processes of those that are whole, the 
dream imagery of those of us who are fortunate 
enough to enjoy the soundest bodily and mental 
health, are much less likely to come under the doc- 
tor's notice than are the experiences of nervous or 
morbid people, or of persons who, owing to tempo- 
rary conditions of illness, are not for the moment 
normal or healthy. 

This is an almost inevitable drawback to the con- 
clusions that the specialist particularly interested in 
this study draws from the cases that come under his 
observation. Almost of necessity his conclusions 
are influenced by the proportion of more or less 
morbid subjects that he will come across. This 
would seem to be explanatory of much that we find 
in the writings of so great a specialist as Freud. 
His books have a world-wide reputation, and on them 
a great school of teaching is based. Freud's dream 



6 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

theory, very briefly stated, is that dreams are deeply 
significant, but never by any chance significant of 
what they would appear superficially to mean. 
They are symbols, he teaches, of desires, thoughts, 
or fears, that are sternly repressed by day and that 
are not admitted to our waking consciousness. By 
day they are therefore unable to intrude their pres- 
ence upon us, but by night, when our will-power is in 
abeyance, they come forth unchecked, repeating 
themselves allegorically and always under a disguise 
in dreams. He sees in sex impulse the origin and 
motive power that excites almost all dream thought 
and action, and in his interpretation of dream sym- 
bols he goes so far as to state in all seriousness that 
dreams which are conspicuously innocent invariably 
embody erotic wishes. Dr. Freud has so elaborated 
his theory of the dream as the symbol of repressed 
desire, and of the distortion of the unconscious wish 
in the dream figure, that it would seem as if the 
theory had become an obsession to which the facts 
have had at times to accommodate themselves. 
Leaving out of account all the other powerful de- 
sires and impulses that actuate our waking lives, he 
sees sex impulse alone amongst them as the force 
which is able to affect the dream mind. 

The examples that he gives of dreams, of various 
mental processes, of curious lapses of memory, and 
of humour in dreams, when not drawn from personal 
experience, were drawn from the patients of his 
clinic, from persons, that is to say, who were suffer- 
ing from every kind of nervous and mental disorder, 



INTRODUCTORY 7 

and this no doubt accounts for their abnormal nature 
and for their ugliness. 

The applications of his theory, as Freud has elab- 
orated it, are unsatisfactory to many of his scientific 
critics, who have condemned the crudities and exag- 
gerations that they discover in them. The value of 
Freud's contribution to science would seem to lie, 
not in these applications to his teaching, or in the 
deductions that his disciples have drawn from it, 
but in the new and original point of view which he 
opened up, and in the great stimulus that he gave to 
explorers in the field of psychological research. 

The principles laid down by Freud have pro- 
foundly altered the conceptions of this generation. 
They have been so unhesitatingly accepted that any- 
one who should question their universal applicability 
would find himself in a small minority, for the mod- 
ern school of psycho-analysis that is based on 
Freud's teaching has an immense vogue both in this 
country and in America. A study of the numerous 
books on the subject available to the ordinary reader 
has made me feel that a greater measure of critical 
common sense might with advantage be brought to 
bear on the conclusions of some of these writers. I 
have no wish to make an attack on the new school 
of teaching; it has the support of great names, and 
in many cases of nervous disorder the therapeutic 
value of psycho-analysis has been established. I 
only venture to question the universal truth of these 
theories when applied to the dreams of perfectly 
normal individuals, for my mind remains uncon- 



8 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

vinced by the explanations and the analyses that are 
given of ordinary dreams by Freudian psycho- 
analysts. I do not believe that all dreams are 
fashioned after the same manner, I am sure that they 
differ from one another as widely as our thoughts 
differ; and that while some may have their origin 
in obscure places of the unconscious, and may be 
symbolic of thoughts which are repressed by day, as 
Freud teaches, the majority of dreams of sane people 
have in all probability a simpler and happier parent- 
age. 1 Many of our dreams are indeed symbolic or 
allegorical in form, but I believe that they represent 
in different ways the moods and thoughts which 
have occupied our minds by day. Happily there is 
no need for us to believe that the nature of the 
dreams which for so many of us make up so great 
an element of pleasure in life has any close relation- 
ship with the morbid obsessions of disease. Night- 
mares and dreams of fear exist, other ugly and evil 
imaginings may also be hidden away out of sight, 
and all these conceptions, side by side with our un- 
counted half -forgotten memories of fair and happy 
things, are set free when the will that controls them 
is wholly or partially suspended at night. But I 
believe that not only are these sinister visions and 
interpretations exaggerated, but I shall also hope 
in this book to show that, in sleep, we are not, or need 
never be, left at their mercy, because we can if we 
choose exercise a real and effective control over the 
nature of our dreams. A sound instinct tells us, and 

i See Chapter VII, "Symbolism in Dreams." 



INTRODUCTORY 9 

tells us convincingly, that neither the mind as it 
works by day, nor that which operates in our dreams, 
acts after the manner described by some of these 
writers. 

The Freudian theory of dream construction may 
be true and may be required to explain certain as- 
pects of the dream life of those who are mentally 
disordered, but I find it very difficult to trace its con- 
nection with a dream life that is so profoundly dif- 
ferent, or with the working of a dream mind which 
carries on its activities in close and harmonious co- 
operation with the normal life of the mind by day. 

It is natural that a large proportion of the litera- 
ture concerning sleep and dreams should be written 
from the point of view of medical science. The 
growth of the belief in the therapeutic value of the 
study of the unconscious has brought this about. 

Apart from the numerous school of writers who 
follow more or less on the lines of Freudian psycho- 
analysis, the clinical study of dreams has been pur- 
sued zealously in France and in America, as well as 
in this country; and the unprofessional student can 
only look with respect and some natural awe at the 
vast library of books that contain the result of these 
investigations. 

Amongst a rarer class of books, those concerned 
with problems of normal dreaming, with the dreams 
of sane and healthy persons, Mr. Havelock Ellis's 
"World of Dreams" seems one of the wisest and 
most lucid. It is, he says, "by learning to observe 
and to understand the ordinary nightly experience of 



10 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

dream life that we shall best be laying the founda- 
tion of future superstructures. For, rightly under- 
stood, dreams may furnish us with clues to the whole 
of life." 1 

The plea that this study should not be confined to 
medical science, and that others besides physicians 
should investigate it from a different standpoint 
from theirs, is beginning to have a response; and 
philosophers are occupied to-day with the problem 
of dreams. M. Bergson, in a lecture delivered orig- 
inally before the Institut Psychologique, and now 
republished in England, has given us his explanation 
of the source from which they spring. He does not 
dwell upon the Freudian theories of repressed de- 
sires and symbolic meanings; but he gives us his 
explanation of dream consciousness and of the 
method by which he believes that dreams originate. 
Sensations of sudden light, sensations of sound and 
of feeling, "which are presented to our eyes, to our 
ears, to our touch during sleep as well as during 
waking," make, he tells us, the starting-point of 
dreams, for our senses remain active, and our 
faculty of sense impression does not stop whilst we 
are asleep, although the impressions that are con- 
veyed to our mind are confused and vague. These 
impressions are, he says, the "raw material out of 
which memory weaves the web of our dreams." 
A dream may, for instance, have for its starting- 
point the sensation caused by a light falling on the 
face of the sleeper. In the dream this may be con- 

i Havelock Ellis, "The World of Dreams." 



INTRODUCTORY 11 

verted into the gleam of moonlight on a pool, into 
a woman's white dress, or the shining of fire; and 
similarly a sound which strikes upon the ear whilst 
we sleep may turn into the thunder of cannon, the 
roar of a train or the crash of waves breaking on a 
cliff. The dream imagination has seized upon the 
sense impression and interpreted it as it pleased, 
and the dream is forthwith started on its course. 
The vague indistinct impression that the dreamer 
received from his eyes, his ears, or sense of touch are 
caught and are converted into precise and deter- 
mined objects by his imagination. 

In this explanation of the starting-point of dreams 
in sense impressions, M. Bergson follows closely in 
the steps of other writers, and especially in those of 
M. Maury, a French writer who wrote on dreams 
some forty years ago. M. Maury's theory does not 
in point of fact carry us very far towards a com- 
plete understanding of the problems connected with 
the working of the mind in sleep. Some dreams 
certainly have their origin in perturbations of the 
brain caused by vibrations started from outside the 
body and striking on the senses; whilst others are 
started by vibrations proceeding from within the 
body and communicated by the nerve system to the 
brain. But it is clear that neither of these state- 
ments gives more than a small part of the truth con- 
cerning the origin of dreams. They may, indeed, 
be started by vibrations, just as a thought may be 
started in that way, but dreams are without doubt 
also set in motion by the mechanism of the mind and 



12 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

of its faculty memory — just as our thoughts are; 
and our dreams, like our thoughts, are shaped by 
the operation of the mind. 

Dreams that have their origin in a physical impres- 
sion are denned by some writers as sensorial dreams, 
and those that originate mainly in mental impres- 
sions and memories as psychic dreams; but this 
classification needs considerable qualification. It is, 
of course, no easy matter to trace back a dream to 
the sense impression which may have started it ; be- 
cause, as such impressions necessarily occur whilst 
we are asleep, no proof of them is generally avail- 
able beyond the dream itself. 1 I am convinced that 
the greater number of my own dreams, especially the 
long coherent dreams, which are the dreams of my 
deepest sleep, would come under the heading of 
psychic dreams ; for they evidently have their origin 
in some strong mental impression, and I find that I 
am hardly ever aware of the sense impressions which 
have possibly helped to stimulate them. The men- 
tal impressions which start a dream on its course are 
generally easily recognised, and are in many in- 
stances created by emotions or thoughts that have 
preoccupied the mind during the day. When, how- 
ever, it happens that the thoughts of our waking 
hours are thus carried on into our sleep, M. Bergson 
would have us believe that we are only imperfectly 
asleep — hardly, he thinks, asleep at all. To use his 
own words in defining his theory of "disinterested- 
ness": To sleep is to become disinterested; one 

i Cf. Chapter X. 



INTRODUCTORY 13 

sleeps to the exact extent to which one " becomes 
disinterested. ' ' And again he says: "At a given 
moment, I become disinterested in the present situa- 
tion, in the present action — in short, in all which pre- 
viously has fixed and guided my memory; in other 
words, I am asleep. 

"A mother who sleeps by the side of her child will 
not stir at the sound of thunder, but the sigh of the 
child will wake her. Does she really sleep in regard 
to her child! We do not sleep in regard to what 
continues to interest us." 

It is difficult and unwise to dogmatise about such 
a point as this, as each of us can speak only from his 
own limited experience; but judging from my own 
dream experience I should venture to say that this 
statement of M. Bergson's is not a convincing state- 
ment about dreaming sleep. It seems to me a misuse 
of words to say that we do not really " sleep" unless 
we cease wholly to be ''interested," for the dreams 
which most often embody the preoccupations of the 
day are, I find, the deep dreams of the soundest 
sleeping time, the dreams, that is to say, of the deep 
night sleep occurring between midnight and about 
four o'clock in the morning. 

The things which have principally absorbed us by 
day are not, of course, necessarily the things that will 
occupy the dream mind; but very often they do so 
occupy it. It happens constantly that some idea that 
fills our thoughts on one day will determine the 
course of our dreams either on the following night or, 
after an interval, a few nights later. For a long time 



14 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

I have very carefully recorded my dreams, and I find 
that the greater number of them are clearly sug- 
gested or modified by whatever has been the domi- 
nant thought or chief interest at the time. For 
instance, in my records of the dreams of deep sleep 
during the period from August to December, 1914, 
and also in 1915, 1916 and 1917, I find that a very 
large proportion of them were founded on or were 
modified by the war, which was the natural preoccu- 
pation of all minds during those months and years. 
The anxieties that it involved, the local activities con- 
nected with the war, the organisation for the housing 
and care of war refugees — these thoughts seem to 
have suggested the greater number of my dreams, or 
to have worked their way into their fabric. 

I did not, in short, to use M. Bergson's phrase, be- 
come ' ' disinterested ' ' when I slept ; or really ' ' sleep ' ' 
at all. And yet unless the word is used in some very 
different sense from the ordinary one, this is cer- 
tainly not true, for my sleep was deep and real. I 
know that this constant continuance of interest, this 
carrying of the thought of the day into the dream 
life, is not an invariable experience. An artist 
whose life is one of great absorption in his work 
tells me that very seldom do the problems of his craft 
or the thought of his pictures enter into his dreams, 
even when they completely fill all his waking 
thoughts. Some authors say that when greatly pre- 
occupied with the books that they were writing they 
have seldom dreamed of these. The experience of 
other writers is exactly the reverse of this; their 



INTRODUCTORY 15 

books fill their dreams or make, at any rate, the 
starting-point from which most of them spring. 

Besides dreams which arise from the predominant 
thought of the day, there are others which have their 
origin in any book that we are reading, especially if 
it be read late at night. The tenor of the book will 
probably be greatly altered in the dream, for the 
dream mind will seize upon some problem suggested 
in its pages and will work it out afresh after its own 
manner. It may, for instance, take the outline of a 
story, transforming it completely, and evoking some- 
thing so different from the original that it is hardly 
to be recognised. 

Other dreams there are which grow out of some 
remembered word or name — a place-name very often. 
A name which he may have almost forgotten by day 
starts into prominence when the control of the nor- 
mal mind ceases. Such a name or word is often the 
point of crystallisation from which a dream of ad- 
venture will radiate. In such a dream each fresh 
incident that occurs suggests another, and this in 
turn suggests some other associated idea or frag- 
ment of memory. All these float up from the re- 
serves where thousands of remote, half-forgotten 
impressions must be stored away. The dream mind 
connects them all together and strings them into a 
whole, elaborating each incident and each memory in 
turn. Our intelligence, which, as M. Bergson says 
truly, does not surrender its reasoning faculty during 
sleep, insists all the time on finding explanations for 
every apparent discrepancy, bridging over the gaps, 



16 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

supplying the missing places in the dream story by 
calling up other memories. So well, indeed, does the 
reasoning faculty carry out its work, that I find as a 
rule little of that incongruity and inconsequence in 
my dreams, that " anarchy" of "dreaming sleep" 
that de Quincey speaks of and that many writers 
describe as being so essential a feature of dreaming. 
On the contrary, the dream imagination and reason- 
ing faculty generally fill up the gaps so effectually 
that the sequence of ideas and events goes forward 
quite naturally and without a hitch and with few of 
the absurdities that people lay so much stress upon. 

The fact is there are dreams and dreams, and we 
must get rid of the assumption that each dream re- 
sembles all the others. To class them all together 
into one or two categories is nearly as absurd as to 
do the same thing with regard to thoughts, each 
dream being an intensely individual operation of 
the mind ; so that whilst some pass through strange 
and confused transformations, many others are as 
logical and consecutive as an ordinary history of 
travel or adventure. Mr. Greenwood wrote of his 
own experience in terms that exactly describe such 
dreams : 

"If there are wildly extravagant dreams without 
sense or order, others take a course as natural and 
consistent as an episode in real life. The theory 
that dreams are always occasioned by mental dis- 
order seems to require that they should always be 
disorderly too, but they are not. Many are not. I 
cannot suppose that my experience differs from 



INTRODUCTORY 17 

thousands of others ; and not rarely, but commonly, 
I have dreams which are throughout as consistent 
in scene and circumstance as any story. Sometimes 
they are romantic and surprising ; but none the less 
they move from point to point on a perfectly rational 
course. The little drama proceeds quite naturally, 
with no incursions of the grotesque, no lapse into 
extravagance, but often with slight Defoe-touches; 
such as the novelist thinks himself happy in contriv- 
ing to heighten the similitude of his story. . . . Con- 
trivance is the word that would most certainly apply 
to the whole structure of such dreams were they the 
written work of the working day. . . . Another 
noteworthy characteristic of these dreams is that 
they seem to tale easily from a store of invention 
distinct from that which we draw upon with more or 
less effort in our waking hours. " " My dreams, f ' he 
adds elsewhere, "are almost invariably as pleasant 
as reading in a good book of romance, or listening to 
strange significant stories of real life. ' ' 1 

I could not claim that all my own dreams have the 
adventurous and imaginative quality of the dreams 
described by Mr. Greenwood. Some happily have 
these qualities, just as some days in our life also pos- 
sess them, days when a fine sense of adventure seems 
to be in the very air we breathe ; but there are many 
other more "every-day" dreams that lack these ro- 
mantic qualities but which are nevertheless the 

1 Frederick Greenwood, "Imagination in Dreams," a book which, 
though written many years ago, still seems to me one of the most 
enlightening of all the studies of dreams, and for the unprofes- 
sional student a most suggestive introduction to the subject. 



18 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

source of great enjoyment; giving the same kind of 
quiet pleasure that we feel when journeying through 
an unfamiliar country, when each little hill we sur- 
mount and each bend of the road that we turn reveals 
to us something new, and the attention is held ab- 
sorbed by all the simple incidents and homely beau- 
ties of the wayside. Just so do some dreams make 
their quiet and pleasant progress. Tranquil as they 
are, they have all the charm of the unexpected, the 
unfamiliar. The incidents of some such dreams writ- 
ten down next morning might seem almost too simple 
to record, but so also would the incidents of many 
days of happy travel. A curious sense of pleasure 
and well-being seems to pervade them that is out of 
all proportion to the incidents that happen in their 
course. In coherent dreams such as these the rea- 
soning faculty, the memory, and the imagination are 
all called upon to bear a part, after the same fashion, 
though not perhaps in the same degree, as when these 
faculties are used in the construction of a work of 
imagination ; and the fact that many dreams are of 
such a nature shows at least that no mere physio- 
logical description of their origin suffices to explain 
them wholly to us. 

We ask what dreams are — how the dream mind 
works which produces them — and our intelligence 
refuses to be satisfied with an answer which tells us 
merely what physical causes may have started them. 
The very nature, the characteristics of such dreams 
makes it equally impossible for us to rest content 
with theories that see in them only the working of a 



INTRODUCTORY 19 

mind in disorder, or only the symbolic representa- 
tions of repressed desire. Neither do we feel that 
they are explained to us when we are told that 
functional disturbances set up disturbances of the 
brain and that these are the cause of our dreams. 
Even the fact that they may be started by vibrations 
of sound, of light, or of touch, making sense impres- 
sions upon the body, does not carry us very far 
towards their comprehension. 

The physiologist may be able to show us how the 
beginnings of a dream occur, "but he cannot get 
beyond a statement of how and where they make 
their beginning. He does not, and cannot, give us 
the answer to the question 'What are our dreams?' 
What faculties of the mind are mostly displayed in 
them? Which, if any, remain dormant? Does any 
mental faculty (such as imagination) change its 
character in our dreams, assume functions of which 
we are unconscious when awake, or exhibit powers 
and properties that only appear in sleep? ... In fine, 
what do our dreams teach us about the constitution 
of the mind and its potentialities as a whole?" * 

This, indeed, is the question that we would ask — 
the thing that we most desire to know. Our task as 
students of dreams should therefore be to find out 
by experiment and careful observation all that we 
can learn about the working of the various mental 
faculties in the dream state ; to find out, for instance, 
in what way the memory works in sleep, to discover 
as much as possible about the extraordinary func- 

i F. Greenwood, "Imagination in Dreams." 



20 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

tions of the imagination in dreams and the superior 
powers and activity that it develops; to study the 
operation of the mind in the borderland between 
sleeping and waking, and to ascertain whether any 
one of our mental faculties is in abeyance whilst we 
dream, and if so to what extent does it cease to 
work? Is our will-power, for example, totally sus- 
pended when we sleep, as many authorities assume 
it to be; or is it able, at any rate, to exercise a 
partial control over our other faculties? This ques- 
tion of the suspension of the will-power during sleep 
is one of special interest; underlying as it does the 
whole theory of " disinterestedness " as denned by 
M. Bergson. It is a widely held belief that when we 
dream the controlling and selecting power of the 
mind entirely ceases. But does it actually cease 1 ? I 
believe that it is not necessarily suspended, and 
that if we choose we can still exercise a consider- 
able degree of selection and control over our 
dreams. 

It is a matter of common experience that we can 
wake up at will at a given hour that has been resolved 
on overnight ; the will in that case operates to awaken 
the sleeper at a definite moment, and it cannot, there- 
fore, have been in a state of entire suspension. I 
have found also that by adopting certain methods 
and by acquiring a certain discipline of mind we can 
ensure that our will shall retain a very considerable 
degree of influence over our dream mind, an influence 
sufficient to give us a real and effective measure of 
command over our dreams. 



INTRODUCTORY 21 

This point has long been one of especial interest 
to rae, and the notes that are given in the next chap- 
ter on the subject of dream control, slight and incon- 
clusive as they may be, embody observations that 
have been made during a period of many years. 



CHAPTER II 

DREAM CONTROL 

If there were dreams to sell, 

What would you buy? 

Some cost a passing bell, 

Some a light sigh, 

That shakes from Life's fresh crown 

Only a rose-leaf down. 

If there were dreams to sell, 

Merry and sad to tell, 

And the crier rung the bell, 

What would you buy? 

— Thomas Beddoes, Bream Pedlary. 

"If there were dreams to sell,' r if indeed the 
dream-pedlar could bring us the dreams of our de- 
sire, how well we know what we would choose ; the 
faces that we would summon in our sleep, the paths 
that our feet should tread, the familiar rooms known 
to us long ago, in which we would find ourselves 
again — if we could buy. Is there any key that will 
open the doors of dreaming at our will? Any secret 
which would give us the power of choice or control 
over the activities of our sleeping hours? Elusive 
phantom-like things our dreams are, evading the 
memory which would hold them fast, refusing often 
to come at our bidding, however great our longing 
may be ; but although this is true, and although we 

may never find any magic word of power that will 

22 



DREAM CONTROL 23 

give us perfect mastery over them, yet I am sure that 
there are some simple secrets, some methods that can 
be learned, by means of which we may in some meas- 
ure command them, and that, more than we yet 
realise, the control of our dreams lies within our 
power. 

We shall only be able to enjoy the full value of our 
heritage in the dream world when we have discovered 
how to make full use of our powers of happy dream- 
ing, and have learned to exercise at any rate a certain 
amount of selection and of control over the nature of 
our dreams. It is obvious that the advantages of 
such control would be great, but it will probably be 
objected that it is impossible radically to alter their 
character, and that the elimination of unhappy or 
evil dreams, and the cultivation of pleasurable 
dreaming are equally outside our powers. The mind 
in sleep, it is often alleged, will always remain inde- 
pendent of our waking thoughts. A philosopher as 
wise as M. Bergson assumes this to be the case, and 
bases his dream theories on the assumption; but a 
long personal experience teaches me that the dream 
mind is far less independent of our will than is 
supposed, and that, to a degree that is not generally 
thought possible, the waking mind can and does 
direct the activities of the mind in sleep. I believe, 
in short, that we can at will stop the recurrence of 
"bad" dreams, or of dreams that we dislike or dread, 
and that we can, to a considerable extent, alter the 
very nature of our dreams by using in our sleep 
the same faculty of rational selection and rejection 



24 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

that we use with regard to our thoughts and to our 
wandering fancies by day. We shall find, when the 
habit is learned, that we can make desired dreams 
recur more or less at will, and that we can develop 
in them certain qualities and powers. In this way 
the habit of dream control will gradually become 
ours. That we should be able to acquire such power 
should not, indeed, seem surprising, for much of the 
latest teaching of science points in the same direc- 
tion, and offers possible clues to the meaning of 
experiences that are familiar to some of us who are 
students of dreams. If we may provisionally accept 
as a working hypothesis the theory that " every 
human organism comprises two mental selves or 
personalities, the normal one and one that comes 
into activity only under hypnosis or in our 
dreams, ' ' 1 this may actually give us such a clue, and 
help to solve some of the difficulties that present 
themselves. Every day more is being ascertained 
about the power of "suggestion" that one mind can 
exercise over another. It is proved by well-attested 
experiments that, under the influence of hypnotic 
suggestion, control, not only of the mind, but of the 
organic processes of the body, can be established, 
and that the power of memory and the powers of the 
senses can be controlled and even greatly heightened 
in this condition. If by means of suggestion one 
mind can thus control another, can command its 
obedience, and actually exalt its powers of memory 
and imagination, it should not be impossible to con- 

i W. McDougal, Encyclopedia Britcmnica, "JEypnotismJ' 



DREAM CONTROL 25 

ceive of a process by which our normal consciousness 
is able to control to some degree the working of our 
subconscious or dream mind in sleep. Parallel and 
very similar to this process is the control that we all, 
consciously or unconsciously, exercise over what are 
popularly called our " nerves " and over the organic 
processes of our own bodies. The lessons learned by 
all who have acquired disciplined habits of mind and 
body suggest that there is nothing fundamentally 
improbable in the belief that we should be able to 
control the actions and the imagination of the sub- 
conscious self in dreams. The problem is how to 
acquire this controlling power, how, in short, we are 
to set up in the dream mind such a habit of response 
and obedience to the command of the waking mind 
as to make voluntary dreaming possible. 

Much may have been written on this subject that 
I have not yet discovered. I have not found in books 
much to help me in gaining this power, nor many 
records of other persons who have sought for or have 
acquired it. Mr. Frederick Myers gave a few in- 
stances of such experiments, and no doubt there are 
others who have found out more than I have done, 
and who have advanced further on these lines. Per- 
haps each of us has at present to puzzle out a solution 
of our own. Each student of dreams who tries to 
get some measure of dream control can only record 
his own limited personal experience ; the sum of all 
such experiences might be of great future value were 
there a clearing house of dreams; but as this does 
not yet exist, I can only write of my own limited and 



26 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

partially successful experiments in dream control — 
first in eliminating a certain class of dream, and 
secondly in cultivating a dream that I wanted to re- 
cur, by heightening and intensifying its pleasurable 
elements. 

Our first practical needs when we begin to acquire 
any control over our dreams is to get rid of "bad 
dreams ' ' of all sorts ; for whether they take the form 
of dreams of grief, dreams of evil, or dreams of fear, 
"bad dreams " are the occasion of real misery to 
very many people. Children and grown-up persons 
often confess that if they had their choice they would 
rather never dream at all than face the chance of a 
bad dream or the recurrence of some particular 
night-fear which they have learned to dread. 

Charles Lamb has described the anguish of his own 
sensitive childhood from this cause. "I was dread- 
fully alive to nervous terrors. The night-time, soli- 
tude, and the dark, were my hell. The sufferings I 
endured in this nature would justify the expression. 
I never laid my head on my pillow, I suppose, from 
the fourth to the seventh or eighth year of my life, 
without an assurance, which realised its own proph- 
ecy, of seeing some frightful spectre." 

There are few of us who have not suffered in child- 
hood from dreams which gave us something of the 
same sense of hopeless and inexplicable terror. It is 
of no use simply to tell those who suffer in this way 
that bad dreams are caused by mismanaged digestive 
or other organic processes, and this is in any case 
only a very partial explanation of the trouble. It 



DREAM CONTROL 27 

may very likely be true that many dreams have their 
origin in some bodily discomfort which is communi- 
cated to the brain, or they may be suggested by some 
underlying and perhaps unsuspected physical cause, 
and in many cases much can be done by finding and 
following sound rules of bodily health ; but it is also 
a matter of common knowledge that a dream which 
may have been started originally by some local bodily 
trouble may go on for a long period of time, repeat- 
ing itself indefinitely like the repetition of an echo, or 
like the thousand reflections that are thrown from 
one mirror to another from opposite walls; so 
the dream will persist long after its original physical 
cause is past and forgotten. Our problem is how to 
rid ourselves effectually of all these disturbing night 
visions. Aided at first by a chance dream, and later 
by certain definite methods of thought, I have been 
able to free myself from all "fear dreams" by one 
method, and by another method to make ''grief 
dreams" or dreams of distress powerless to disturb 
me. 

A suggestion that greatly helped me to cure such 
dreams came from an experience that is common to 
almost every one. Probably we have all at some 
time or another realised that our dream was "only a 
dream" and not a waking reality. The idea con- 
tained in this very general experience made the point 
from which I succeeded in starting a successful ex- 
periment in dream control. On various occasions 
long ago, when a dream of grief or terror was becom- 
ing intolerably acute, the thought flashed into my 



28 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

sleeping mind, "This is only a dream; if you wake, 
it will be over, and all will be well again. ' ' If only 
we could ensure the realisation of this fact directly 
bad dreams appeared, they would cease to have any 
terrors for us, for a way of escape would always be 
open. Therefore I tried repeating this formula to 
myself from time to time, during the day and on 
going to bed, always in the same words — "Remem- 
ber this is a dream. You are to dream no longer" — 
until, I suppose, the suggestion that I wanted to 
imprint upon the dream mind became more definite 
and more powerful than the impression of any 
dream; so that when a dream of distress begins to 
trouble me, the oft-repeated formula is automatic- 
ally suggested, and I say at once : "You know this is 
a dream; you shall dream no longer — you are to 
wake. ' ' For a time after this secret had been fully 
learned, this would always awaken me at once ; now- 
adays, the formula having been said, I do not have 
to wake, though I may do so, but the original fear 
dream always ceases. It is simply "switched off," 
and a continuation of the dream, but without the 
disturbing element, takes its place and goes forward 
without a break. 

There is nothing in this very simple method but 
what any one can carry out for himself if he be so 
inclined, an occasional steady concentration of the 
mind upon the formula that is to be used being all 
that is needed. In practice I find that, whatever 
form of words is decided upon, it should at first be 
repeated rather frequently, sometimes aloud, and 



DREAM CONTROL 29 

always in the same words ; and as it is easier to most 
of us to learn prose or poetry by heart, if the thing 
to be learnt is read over before going to sleep, so, 
until the formula has become a habit of mind, it 
should be repeated, if possible, just before we sleep. 

In most cases the disordered dream is stopped by 
a simple word of command, which either ends it 
abruptly as the falling of the stage curtain brings the 
play to a close, or which ends it by changing the 
dream scene, as one magic lantern picture fades out 
and gives place to another. 1 

The following dream note shows how the formula 
can be used to get rid of the element of fear in a 
dream without the necessity of awakening from it : — 

During the course of a long dream I had succeeded 
in tracing the existence of a complicated and danger- 
ous plot against our country. The conspirators had 
turned upon me on discovering how much I knew. 
I was so closely followed, and my personal danger 
became so great, that the formula for breaking off a 
dream flashed into my mind and automatically gave 
me back confidence; I remembered that I could 
make myself safe; but with the feeling of safety I 
also realised that if I were to wake my valuable 
knowledge of the dangerous conspiracy would be 

1 A dream which probably haunted and broke the rest of num- 
berless women during the years between 1914 and 1919 was one in 
which ill news came to us by telegram of husband or of sons at the 
front. Like other mothers, I suffered anguish from such a dream, 
until I learnt how to master it by this formula. It would be dif- 
ficult to express how great was the relief when I knew that I could 
lie down to sleep free from this particular dread. 



30 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

lost, for I realised that this was "dream knowledge." 
It was a dreadful dilemma — safety called me one 
way, but the conviction that my duty was to stay and 
frustrate the traitors was very strong. I feared that 
I should give way, and I knelt and prayed that I 
might have courage not to seek safety by awakening, 
but to go on until I had done what was needed. I 
therefore did not wake; the dream continued. The 
arch-conspirator, a white-faced man in a bowler hat, 
had tracked me down to the building where I was 
concealed, and which by this time was surrounded; 
but all fear had departed, the comfortable feeling of 
great heroism, only fully enjoyed by those who feel 
themselves to be safe, was mine. It became a de- 
lightful dream of adventure, since the element of 
fear had gone from it. 

This question of our power of control over our 
dreams becomes a practical one, and of serious im- 
portance, when we realise how closely it touches the 
health and happiness of our children; for the evil 
dreams that oppressed Charles Lamb's sensitive 
childhood are unhappily shared in more or less 
degree by many children, and are too often the cause 
of anguish to them. It would be a great gain if those 
who suffer thus could be helped to understand the 
nature of their troubles and to become to some extent 
the masters of their dreams. 

It is useless to try to protect the children we love 
from this particular misery by keeping away from 
them all impressions that seem to us likely to pro- 
duce bad dreams ; for from the most harmless things 



DREAM CONTROL 31 

in the world, from the picture of a friendly farmyard 
on the nursery wall, the child's dream imagination 
will fashion its own fear, and create for itself a thing 
of horror. We know from Lamb's account how the 
hated picture of the raising of Samuel gave to his 
midnight terrors "the shape and manner of their 
visitation " : " . . . had I never met with the picture, 
the fears would have come self-pictured in some 
shape or other. . . . * Headless bear, black man, or 
ape' . . . but as it was, my imagination took that 
form. ' ' 

Charles Lamb understood only too well how in- 
tangible these night-fears of childhood are; how 
often the dread is spiritual in its nature, "remote 
from fear of bodily injury to ourselves . . . strong 
in proportion as it is objectless on earth." And this 
dread has to be borne alone, since it is generally 
unconfessed and unshared. A child's silence about 
his bad dreams adds to the power that they have to 
make him suffer. He may be willing to speak of his 
good dreams, but he is often ashamed to say anything 
about the night-terror that oppresses him. He is 
checked by the mere possibility that the fears that 
are so real to him, but that he can hardly put into 
words, will be met with a smile ; and so he does not 
venture to speak of things that by day he knows will 
seem absurd, but which nevertheless have power to 
torture him inexpressibly when night falls. Now if 
a child is to be helped at all in this matter there must 
first of all be deeply rooted in his heart an absolute 
confidence that he will not be laughed at. The child 's 



32 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

confidence in his mother about his dreams would be 
no bad criterion of his trust in her understanding and 
sympathy. If his confidence has been once gained, 
how can he be helped to master his night-fears'? 
Many people will say that there is nothing that can 
be done. I believe, on the contrary, that in the early 
years of childhood most of us could easily be taught 
simple methods of control, such as those that I have 
described, which would be effective in stopping this 
misery. If a child once knows that he is not defence- 
less, and that he possesses in his own will-power a 
real and efficient weapon against his bad dreams, he 
will assuredly learn how to use it. You give him 
hope, and you take away from him the paralysing 
sense of helplessness that is almost the worst part 
of the trouble. 

One of the processes by which this control can be 
obtained has been described. The form of words to 
be taught or suggested to a child for its use should, 
of course, be as short and as simple as possible. It 
may be, if you will, in some such words as, "This 
is only a dream — it must stop, ' y or any other similar 
formula. Whatever words are to be used, they must 
be repeated very often, especially on going to bed, 
until they are so familiar that when the bad dream 
occurs the formula will automatically flash into the 
dream mind at the same time. In my experience this 
will soon suffice to put a stop to it. The method of 
dream control will be most easily imparted to a child 
in the form of a story about other children and their 



DREAM CONTROL 33 

dreams. 1 If the theory about dreams is true, which 
is described in this book, and on which I have acted 
for many years, namely that by thinking about our 
dreams we can influence them and can definitely alter 
their character, a child 's dream life might be greatly 
and happily modified in this way. Whatever talents 
for delightful dreaming he may possess will be en- 
couraged, and he will learn to enjoy this good gift 
without the fear that now too often spoils the antici- 
pation of dreaming — the fear of evil dreams. There 
are, of course, many other kinds of bad dreams, 
apart from these night-fears of childhood and other 
"fear dreams." The rest of one sleeper is broken 
by vivid imaginings of loss or estrangement, whilst 
another describes the strange sense of fathomless 
despair that he experiences and dreads. We know 
from medieval literature that many dreams used to 
be regarded as directly sent by the Enemy of man- 
kind. Dreams of evil and dreams of desire, that 
were natural but unlawful to the recluse, no doubt 
often assailed the hermit or the inmates of the 
cloister, their life of stern repression leaving them 
more helplessly at the mercy of such troublous 
dreams than others are. 2 In the "Form of Living," 
written by Eichard the Hermit for the guidance of 

1 The imaginary children whose dream adventures I should tell 
of should not only learn to master their bad dreams by these meth- 
ods, but they should go on to find out for themselves the pleasures 
of dream adventures and travel, and the joy of learning to fly. To 
be effective the story should be very simply and prosaically told. 

2 Cf . Chapter XIV. 



34 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

the Anchoress Margaret, he tells her of "six maners 
of dremes (in thus many maners touches the ymage 
of dremes men when they slepe.)" Two of these 
he tells her, come from over-eating, and "such no 
man, holy or other, may escape." The third comes 
from "Illusions of the Enemy," and he warns her 
that ' ' where many dremes er, thare er many vanitees, 
and many that may make to erre. ' ' 

We may, happily for ourselves, be free from most 
of the uncomfortable dreams that Richard Rolle de- 
scribed, but whatever our particular night-fear or 
special dream of grief may be, most people would 
agree that a method that would enable us to get rid 
of the dreams that we dislike or dread would be an 
incalculable boon. The need must be as old as 
dreaming itself, and people in all ages have sought 
a way by which it could be accomplished. 

Amongst a collection of objects lately exhibited in 
London, illustrative of superstitions that had sur- 
vived from a past age and that had lingered on into 
this century, there were to be seen certain stones 
pierced by natural holes, which were intended to be 
hung as a talisman over the bed of sleepers afflicted 
with bad dreams. Many such simple charms were 
no doubt used ; I have not tested the efficacy of any 
of these, the only magic or spell that I have person- 
ally proved being the formula that I have already 
described, and a second formula that I have also 
found useful, and that is described in the next chap- 
ter. 

In making and describing these experiments in 



DREAM CONTROL 35 

dream control the desirability of getting rid of bad 
dreams has been assumed; and probably the major- 
ity of dreamers would make this assumption and 
would agree that they would gladly rid themselves 
of all dreams of distress if they could do so by some 
simple method. It must, however, be noted that 
from another point of view — that of the Freudian 
psycho-analyst — repression or control, leading to the 
abolition of bad dreams, is no unmixed blessing, but 
is in all likelihood a mistake. He sees in the bad 
dream a definite warning, hidden under a symbolical 
form, of some physical or moral evil, a warning 
which may only be disregarded at our peril, just as 
the ordinary symptoms of disease may only be dis- 
regarded at grave risk. The effect of controlling the 
content of our dreams is, he tells us, to force them to 
hide their true significance, so that the problems 
which they symbolise are only able to appear under 
a still more complete disguise : bad dreams are there- 
fore looked on by him as warnings, beneficial if prop- 
erly interpreted, not as evils to be avoided. 

It will perhaps only become possible for us to 
adopt this attitude, and to welcome, instead of shun- 
ning, evil dreams, when we have learned to have a 
more unquestioning faith in the teachers of the new 
school of healing who are prepared to furnish us 
with the interpretation of our dreams ; but this faith 
must first be attained, and until our conviction as to 
the reliability of their analysis is more assured, there 
will probably be a majority of people who would 
gladly make the exchange that I have suggested, and 



36 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

rid themselves of their bad dreams, even if these be 
fraught with possible instruction, in return for a 
dream life peaceful and, unsullied, in which the 
happier experiences of the day are reflected and the 
adventures of the imagination are carried on with- 
out fear of any ugly or terrifying interruption. 



CHAPTER III 



FLYING DREAMS 



I sing the praise of dreams. Daily will I give thanks to the 
Highest for the freeing of the spirit of man from the labour and 
sorrows that are his by day. For dreams, the delight of the 
world, I will give praise. 

Besides the formula which was given in the last 
chapter, which conveys to the dream mind the mes- 
sage that the dream is only a dream which can be 
altered or ended at our pleasure, there is another 
which I have also found to be successful in getting 
rid of dream fears. This method is described in 
the following notes on flying dreams which are taken 
from the notes that I have made and kept for many 
years. 

Flying dreams form only one variety of the many 
happy dreams that have added so much pleasure to 
my life. I have chosen this class of dreams to speak 
of more particularly because they furnish the ex- 
amples that I can most easily quote of the process of 
dream control, and of the use of a formula in obtain- 
ing that control. They show also that by an act of 
will, and by some concentration of thought upon 
them, they may be cultivated, with the result that 
greatly heightened dream powers, such as the per- 
fected faculty of dream flight, may be acquired with- 

37 



38 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

out any serious difficulty, and with great advantage 
to ourselves. 

My first recollections of flying dreams go back to 
when I was a very little child, when we were living in 
London. The flying dream, when it first came, was 
connected with the sensation of fear. Half-way up 
the dimly lighted staircase that led to our nursery a 
landing opened on to a conservatory. The conser- 
vatory by day was a sunny place full of the pleasant- 
est associations, but with the coming of darkness its 
character changed altogether. In the night-time 
anything might be imagined to lurk in its unlighted 
corners ; decidedly it was safest always to hurry past 
that landing, and even past the other landings which, 
though they did not open on to any such dark spots, 
were not places where a child cared to linger alone. 
In some of the first dreams that I can remember I 
was on that staircase, fearful of something which I 
was especially anxious never to have to see. It was 
then that the blessed discovery was made, and that I 
found that it was just as easy to fly downstairs as to 
walk ; that directly my feet left the ground the fear 
ceased — I was quite safe; and this discovery has 
altered the nature of my dreams ever since. At first 
I only flew down one particular flight of steps, and 
always downwards ; but very soon I began to fly more 
actively. If anything began to alarm me in my 
dreams, I used to try to rise in the air, but for some 
years I was unable to rise to any great height, or to 
fly with real ease. It was only gradually that the 
flying dream ceased to be connected with the sensa- 



FLYING DREAMS 39 

tion of fear and escape. For a long time it was 
often an effort to fly; every year, however, made it 
easier and more sure. By degrees "bad dreams" 
left me. When once I realised that I could always 
escape by flight, the sense of the something unknown, 
to be escaped from, became a thing of the past ; but 
the power of flying grew and has steadily improved 
all my life. 

The actual process by which I fly in my dreams 
has always been the same since the earliest days 
when I first fluttered down the nursery staircase. 
From what others have told me, there seems to be a 
good deal of variety in the manner in which different 
people fly. By giving a slight push or spring with 
my feet I leave the ground and fly without further 
effort, by a simple act of volition. A slight paddling 
motion by my hands increases the pace of the flight, 
and is used either to enable me to reach a greater 
height, or else for the purpose of steering, especially 
through any narrow place, such as through a door- 
way or window. If I am at all fatigued by a long 
flight, this motion of the hands is of great assistance 
and gives confidence and increased power. 

Differing slightly from the flying dream is the glid- 
ing dream, which is also a very common and widely 
shared experience. In this dream the feet are not 
used and do not move at all; I glide a few inches 
above the ground, as though I were walking in the 
ordinary way, but without any effort. 

Flying or gliding dreams, in whatever shape they 
occur, bring with them a keen sense of pleasure. 



40 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

Even when such a dream is full of varied incident or 
adventure, it is always restful and refreshing. I 
awake reluctantly from it with a sense of regret that 
it should be over. Its outlines are generally very 
clear-cut and easily recalled to memory, and it is 
hardly ever inconsequent, as some dreams are. I 
have no doubt that the increased power of flight 
which I now enjoy, and which has been a matter of 
steady growth, is to be attributed to the system that 
I have described. Thinking about these dreams has 
certainly enabled me to dream them. When I had 
discovered the method by which bad dreams could be 
got rid of, I tried to find out how far I could con- 
sciously control dreaming by inducing a particular 
dream to recur. I found that if I steadily thought 
about such a dream as the flying dream it would soon 
come back. It will not, indeed, come exactly to order, 
but it will come after a short interval. I have never 
been able exactly to measure this interval; it may be 
of two or three nights, or it may be longer, varying 
very much according to the definiteness with which 
the waking mind has been concentrated upon the 
idea. Especially after talking about flying I find 
that I am certain very soon to dream of it. 

I have tried also to see how far, by thinking of the 
dream, I could accomplish some definite result in it; 
how far, for instance, I could perform some new and 
difficult act of flight. It was a long time before I 
could fly higher than five or six feet from the ground, 
and it was only after watching and thinking about 
the flight of birds, the soaring of the larks above the 



FLYING DREAMS 41 

Wiltshire Downs, the hovering of a kestrel, the action 
of the rooks' strong wings, and the glancing flights 
of swallows, that I began to achieve in my dreams 
some of the same bird-like flights. After I had 
thought long and often about flying over high trees 
and buildings, I found that I was getting the power 
to rise to these heights with ever lessening difficulty 
and effort. 

I then became anxious above all things to achieve 
a dream in which I should fly over the sea. The 
dream came at last, and I found myself on the shore 
looking at the waters of the Atlantic. Beginning 
at first with short uncertain flights over the sea, I 
soon found that I need not fear. Flying in the air 
or gliding on the water was equally safe and easy, 
and so I started, and with a flight like that of a sea- 
gull, I flew away with boldness across the Atlantic 
waves. 

The motions of aeroplanes have of late years sug- 
gested similar dreams, in which I take the pilot's 
place, and steer a small aeroplane through the loop- 
ing flights of the practised airman. Mechanical 
difficulties are rare in dreams of flying, and if any- 
thing untoward does happen (and even in my dreams 
I do not understand an engine) I have only to desert 
my plane and to take refuge in my natural way of 
flight. 

A dream that I recorded many years ago gave me 
a second formula which has been of use to me ever 
since. By giving confidence in my power to fly it 
has not only been the source of great pleasure by 



42 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

making difficult experiments in flying easy, but it has 
given a greatly increased sense of security from all 
bad dreams. Fear may come into a dream, but this 
need not trouble us if, by a bird's flight, the dreamer 
can quickly be carried into safety ; for confidence in 
one's power of flight will then be all that is needed. 
In my dream I was present at a party given in the 
rooms of the Royal Society in Burlington House. 
Lord Kelvin, Lord Rayleigh, Sir William Ramsay, 
my brother-in-law, Sir Arthur Rucker, and many 
others whom I knew, were there. They were stand- 
ing together in a little group, and my brother-in-law 
asked me to explain to them my method of flying. I 
could not explain how it was done, only that it seemed 
to me much easier to fly than to walk. At his sug- 
gestion I made some experimental flights — circling 
round the ceiling, rising and falling, and showing 
them also the gliding or floating movement near the 
ground. They all discussed it critically as though 
they were rather ' ' on the defensive ' ' about the pro- 
ceeding, looking upon it, I think, as a new and doubt- 
ful experiment, rather savouring of a conjuring trick. 
Then Lord Kelvin came forward and, speaking with 
that gracious manner that his friends so well remem- 
ber, said that he felt the power of human flight to be 
less surprising, less baffling than the others seemed 
to think it. "The law of gravitation had probably 
been in this case temporarily suspended. ' ' — ' ' Clearly 
this law does not for the moment affect you when you 
fly," he said to me. The others who were present 
agreed to this, and said that this was probably the 



FLYING DREAMS 43 

solution of the puzzle. An assistant was standing 
behind the group of men, and in order to show them 
that flying is not really difficult, I took his hand, and 
begging him to have confidence in me and to trust to 
my guidance, I succeeded in making him fly a few 
inches from the ground. 

Since then, when I fly, if people notice the flight 
at all, which is very seldom, Lord Kelvin's explana- 
tion always seems to satisfy them. His reply also 
gave me the second formula that I can make use of 
in a dream in case of need, and, like the original 
formula, it is always successful. 

I have sometimes fancied in the middle of a flight 
that I am losing my power to fly ; I have begun then 
to drift downwards in the air, and have failed to rise 
again easily. At such moments the "word of 
power" comes into my mind, and I repeat to myself, 
" You know that the law of gravitation has no power 
over you here. If the law is suspended, you can fly 
at will. Have confidence in yourself, and you need 
not fear." Confidence is the one essential for suc- 
cessful flight, and confidence being thus restored, I 
find that I can fly again with ease. 

It seems to be a matter of common experience that 
partial failure of power in a dream generally occurs 
when the dreamer is emerging from the deepest levels 
of sleep and is approaching the waking level. In 
very deep sleep all sense and remembrance of our 
tired body and relaxed limbs disappear, and we are 
therefore able to carry on every dream movement 
with ease. It is only when we come nearer to the 



44 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

moment of awakening that consciousness of our 
physical condition begins to interfere with the dream 
imagination and that a sense of effort comes in. 

This question of effort or inhibition of movement 
in dreams is fully discussed in various books. Mr. 
Havelock Ellis gives a very interesting description of 
it and of its probable causes. He says: "When in 
dreams we become conscious of difficult movement, 
it has frequently, and perhaps usually, happened that 
the motor channels are not entirely closed, the 
sensory channels unusually open, and very fre- 
quently, though not necessarily, this is associated 
with the approach of awakening. . . . The question 
of movement in dreams, of the presence or absence 
of effort and inhibition, is explicable by reference 
to the depth of sleep and the particular groups of 
centres involved. The full normal sleep movements 
are purely ideatory, and no difficulty arises in execut- 
ing any movement, for the reason that there is no 
movement at all, or even any attempt at movement. 
Movement or attempt at movement tends to occur 
when the motor and sensory centres are in a par- 
tially aroused state; it is a phenomenon which be- 
longs to the period immediately before awakening. ' ' 1 

People who suffer from nightmares describe their 
total inability to move in the presence of some im- 
minent danger as being the most painful feature of 
such dreams. I have not actually experienced this 
kind of dream, but it has often happened in the 
course of a long flight that I have found my powers of 

i Havelock Ellis, "The World of Dreams." 



FLYING DREAMS 45 

flying gradually lessening and to some extent failing 
me. 

Formerly this loss of power used to herald my 
awaking from the dream, but now I either use the 
''formula " which gives confidence and restores the 
power to fly or the memory of previous experiences 
comes to my aid, and I recollect at such moments that 
by ascending to a slight elevation of any kind, to a 
hill or the upper story of a building, a fresh start can 
be made, and I can fly again from this height with 
renewed vigour. In such a case I do not have to 
awake; the dream simply takes on a fresh lease of 
life, and the dream journey or adventures are con- 
tinued without interruption. The following is an 
example of such a dream : 

November, 1914. 

A Flying Dream in War-time 

When the dream began I was waiting in a high 
office-like room which I knew to be closely connected 
with the War Office. Its walls were painted a light 
green colour, and whilst I waited I noticed that the 
prints which hung round it were arranged very ir- 
regularly and very high up on the walls. I was 
expecting a dispatch that I had volunteered to carry 
to the Army Headquarters in Belgium, flying in the 
manner in which I fly in my dreams. 

There was some delay in its coming, and I flew up 
round the room partly to test my power of flight, but 
also to see if the window would make a good starting- 



46 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

place. Whilst I circled round I examined the pic- 
tures — one, a small engraving of the second Earl 
Grey, was framed in a narrow "early Victorian" 
gold frame, and as it hung crookedly, it caught my 
attention, and I tried to straighten it, but the nail 
on which it hung was loose and the picture came off 
into my hand. At that moment the door opened 
and an official came in. I descended and began to 
apologise and explain, but he smiled and said it did 
not signify. ' ' In fact, ' ' he said, " it is rather a lucky 
coincidence^ — we were wondering what we could 
possibly send with you to serve as an introduction 
or passport. Lord Grey's relationship to Sir Ed- 
ward 'Grey, our Secretary of State, is well known 
abroad. His picture will introduce you at once and 
be a guarantee of your good faith ; you must take it 
with you!" "How tiresome of the War Office!" I 
thought; "fancy having to carry this framed picture 
on my flight!" However, I could not well refuse, 
and I fastened it as well as I could by means of its 
cord to my waist. I asked for a map of the country 
as being absolutely necessary to guide my flight. 
The official said that they had hunted all over the 
War Office for a map of Belgium but could only find 
a very old one ; but he added : "This will matter less 
because all the towns and villages of Belgium are so 
old that you will find them all marked upon this old 
map." The map produced was inded very ancient; 
it was on yellowish paper or parchment, beautifully 
written, with the names of Flemish towns and vil- 
lages in old-fashioned characters, but with no rail- 



FLYING DREAMS 47 

ways marked on it and but very few roads. I pro- 
tested, but it was all I could get. "You will fly over 
Naville . . . and . . . and Dischemoote," I was 
told. I wondered anxiously how I should recognise 
all these places as I flew over them, but I need not 
have troubled about this. I found afterwards that it 
was not so difficult as I had imagined, for the country 
itself, as seen from above, looked singularly like the 
map. 

It was getting dark now, and I was to start when 
it was dark enough for me to be practically unseen. 
I flew up to the window, and holding my awkward 
map before me, I stood on the ledge and flew out over 
the roofs of a foreign-looking town. I saw below me 
first of all houses and streets, then a road which 
passed through various scattered houses and vil- 
lages. "There is Naville,' * I thought. ... I flew 
on and on, and presently began to get tired. I was 
flying rather low by now, and this made me anxious, 
for it was beginning to get lighter, and I could see 
groups of men standing about in the dim light — 
they were dressed in odd, dark-brown clothes (like 
Dutchmen, I thought). I was not afraid of them, 
but I knew that I must get away if I were to take 
my dispatch safely to its destination. Once I 
nearly descended amongst them, but I got away in 
time, and unseen, and entered a house. I ran up its 
staircase and found my way to an upper window, 
from which I flew off at a good height from the 
ground and with a strong steady flight. The sky 
was getting lighter, and I saw against the dawn a 



48 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

row of ragged wind-swept trees. There were many- 
other incidents by the way which I forget; but at 
last I arrived at my destination — the Army Head- 
quarters. The place was a strange castle. ... I 
entered with the War Office dispatch and found in 
supreme command there Mr. Winston Churchill, to 
whom I gave the paper and from whom I had to re- 
ceive my instructions. I was escorted through the 
castle passages to where, underground, beneath the 
castle itself, in strange vaulted halls, a royal court 
was installed. A stately procession, a king, a queen 
and attendants, were passing down a high arched 
corridor of this underground palace into which I 
looked. Although it was broad daylight above, the 
halls were lighted artificially and the atmosphere 
of the whole place seemed curious and unnatural, 
and a longing came over me to leave the castle as I 
had come to it, by flight. 

No one stopped me, and I followed a boy in 
Scout's uniform up to the open air into the court- 
yard, where a party of Belgian Boy Scouts were 
practising experiments in flying and were achieving 
short, spasmodic flights under the direction of Mr. 
Winston Churchill. Their funny attitudes amused 
me, and I stood laughing and watching — "They 
look like frogs trying to fly," I thought. I passed 
on, and made my way up to the great outer walls 
of the castle, and I then saw how shattered and 
ruined its ramparts were. The narrow walk lead- 
ing round the top of the walls was broken away in 
places and was very dangerous, but the gaps in the 



FLYING DREAMS 49 

path did not trouble me, for where walking is dan- 
gerous flying is safe, and from these walls I started 
afresh and flew away. 

Oftenest of all nowadays the flying dream oc- 
curs in surroundings of lofty rooms and the great 
staircases of palatial buildings which I do not 
know. Sometimes I am in the British Museum or 
one of the other public galleries. I want to get to 
the end of the long rooms, and I fly lightly along 
them. As a bird in a room naturally flies along 
the ceiling, I float upwards and fly along at that 
level. One does not realise, until one gets accus- 
tomed to flying instead of walking, how big a space 
there is between the ceiling and the tops of doors 
and windows. One has to float downwards for 
some distance and steer through the doorway in 
order to get from room to room or from one gal- 
lery to another. When the flying or gliding dream 
begins I find myself always now in my "flying 
dress" — it is a dress of straight close folds which 
fall three or four inches below my feet. The rea- 
son for this is that, once or twice when I have been 
moving among crowds in busy streets, gliding just 
clear of the ground, I thought that people must no- 
tice that my feet never move like theirs. In Ox- 
ford Street one day, when the pavement was very 
crowded, I feared that it would attract attention 
disagreeably if people noticed this fact, and that 
the curiosity of it might lead to an inconvenient 
amount of notice. I left the thronged thorough- 



50 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

fare and went quickly down Duke Street to avoid 
observation. Once in the quieter street, I flew 
along comfortably, but the next time I began to 
dream I found that I wore a long dress which hid 
my feet entirely, and no one can now see that I am 
not walking just as they are. It has struck me 
sometimes as a curious thing that, however crowded 
the rooms may be when I am flying, no notice what- 
ever is taken even of the most daring flights, but I 
have learnt now that this is almost always the case. 
Either it is quite unnoticed or more probably I am 
unseen. 

It will be seen from these extracts from my notes 
on flying dreams that beyond the power of eliminat- 
ing or ending bad dreams, which has been a great 
gain, the measure of control that I have been able 
to acquire is limited, amounting to a certain power 
of making a favourite dream recur more or less at 
will, and of being able greatly to increase its pleas- 
urable features. Beyond this I have not gone, and 
perhaps if our success were greater, if our control 
were to become more perfect, our pleasure in 
dreaming would be lessened. If our dreams could 
be successfully harnessed and brought under even 
the measure of discipline to which our wandering 
thoughts have to submit by day, they would cease 
to have the charm which their unexpectedness gives 
them, and with the loss of freedom they would lose 
one of their greatest attractions. But we need not 
fear — nature will take only too good care that our 
control shall not go too far, and that the spontaneity 



FLYING DREAMS 51 

and freedom of our dreams shall never be too seri- 
ously crippled. In making the simple experiments 
that I have made I have had no idea of bringing 
my dreams into any strict subjection, but have only 
tried to ascertain how far will-power really ceases 
to exercise its functions when we sleep. 

To my mind the answer to this question is that it 
does still exercise considerable authority over the 
operations of the dream mind, and that its control 
can, by certain simple methods, and by some con- 
centration of thought, be greatly extended. Mem- 
ory also, no doubt, takes a part in the causation of 
such dreams as these. Each dream of flying makes 
the next flight easier; memories of previous oc- 
casions when the dream-consciousness was occu- 
pied with these problems tend to act as echoes do 
and to repeat themselves again and again. And if 
by day the mind turns from time to time to the 
same thought and recalls the incidents [of some 
dream adventure, such dreams are apt to reward 
our remembrance and to come back to us at night- 
fall at our bidding. 



CHAPTER IV 

DREAM RECORDING 

Yet if little stays with man, 

Ah, retain we all we can ! 
If the clear impression dies, 
Ah, the dim remembrance prize! 

Ere the parting hour go by, 

Quick thy tablets, Memory! 

— Matthew Arnold, A Memory Picture. 

The question of the continuance of activity of 
the will during sleep is only one of the many prob- 
lems 'that suggest themselves when we begin to 
think about the operation of our mental faculties in 
the dream state. Equally worthy of note is the 
way in which the memory works whilst we sleep, the 
way in which it supplies the materials out of which 
our dreams are fashioned, calling up from its un- 
seen treasures things new and old, recalling count- 
less dimly remembered or forgotten scenes, and im- 
pressions that were hardly even sensed by us at 
all. Out of these hidden stores memory, aided 
by imagination, weaves for us the many-coloured 
web of our dreams. But memory has another and 
quite different function to perform with regard to 
dreams. She not only furnishes us with their 
fabric, but she also enables us to recapture and to 
record the dream scenes that fade so quickly away 

52 



DREAM RECORDING 53 

and that are so hard to hold. Hers is the two- 
fold function of dream-builder and dream-recorder. 
The part that memory and imagination play in the 
building of our dreams will be dealt with presently; 
but meanwhile a brief space must be given here to 
dream recording. 

To be able to remember and to write down cor- 
rectly the sequence of a dream should be an essen- 
tial qualification for a student of dreams. As a 
matter of fact, it seems to be a very rare one, and 
one of the difficulties that faces every one who tries 
to write seriously about dreams is that of obtain- 
ing faithful dream records on which observations 
can be safely based. If in the future their study 
is to have any value, it is necessary that we should 
find out the best methods of making accurate notes 
of dreams. Anyone who has tried for himself to 
make such notes, or obtain them from others, will 
have realised how great this difficulty is, and will 
have discovered some of the practical obstacles that 
stand in the way of writing down even a simple 
dream. 

The difficulties are not insuperable, and in this 
matter of dream recording, as in that of dream con- 
trol, it is possible, by means of certain easily ac- 
quired methods and some concentration of mind, to 
make accurate notes of dreams if we require to do 
so. The initial difficulty that meets us is their 
evanescence; we have all probably experienced the 
sharp disappointment when we have vainly tried 
to hold fast the elusive memory of a dream from 



54 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

which we have just awakened, and have realised 
that the more feverishly we strive to remember it 
the more intangible it becomes and the more rap- 
idly it fades away. Do what we will, we cannot re- 
call more than floating detached fragments, and 
glimpses of its scenes. A thick mist of oblivion 
seems to come between us and the memory that we 
want to recall and literally blots it out. A sea-fog 
rolling in over sea and land, and obliterating every 
outline, is the best image of the mist of forgetful- 
ness that nature often interposes between our 
dreams and our waking consciousness. How are 
we to roll this back, and recover the scenes and 
events that it so quickly hides? 

There are, no doubt, many ways that other 
dreamers have discovered for themselves. I can 
only speak of those that, after long practice, I my- 
self have found to be successful. 

To begin with, the first thought and immediate 
occupation of the mind on awaking must be the 
recollection of the dream; the only thing further 
that is needed is a certain habit of mind that is bet- 
ter expressed in the French word recueillement 
than in any word of our own. An attitude of quiet 
attentiveness should be ours ; the mind must be un- 
hurried, it must be watchful, as one who looks long 
and steadfastly into a still pool to see what is mir- 
rored there. As it thus gazes there will come back 
to it one by one the scenes of the late dream. 

The dream should first be allowed to unroll itself 
very quietly backwards in a series of slowly moving 



DREAM RECORDING 55 

pictures, starting from the end and going back 
through scene after scene to its beginning, until the 
whole dream has been seen. In order to get a com- 
plete record of a long dream, this process should be 
followed, and then, if possible, the reverse process 
should be carried out and the dream retraced from 
its starting-point to its ending. In this way the 
scenes, events and conversations that have made up 
the dream story can, when the habit of recollection 
has been acquired, be retraced. They should then 
be written down at once. It is only thus, and by 
making the written notes immediately, that I find 
it possible to make accurate transcripts of long and 
complex dreams, and in this fact, no doubt, lies a 
great part of our difficulty in getting such records 
made. The dreamer generally waits until the 
morning to retrace his dream, and then perhaps 
tells it or writes it down. It has by that time lost 
some of its sharp edges and its definition. There 
will be blank spaces left in his memory; there is 
nothing easier than for the memory half uncon- 
sciously to fill in those blanks. The dreamer may 
soon begin to think that he remembers what hap- 
pened in the blurred intervals, or perhaps tries to 
complete his dream story which broke off with such 
disappointing suddenness, by an ending that sug- 
gests itself, and that makes an artistic finish to the 
story when it is told the next morning; but as the 
only possible value of the dream record lies, not in 
its artistic or dramatic character, but solely in its 
absolute truthfulness, the dream should always be 



56 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

written down as soon as possible. The mere fact 
that this is necessary often prevents the dream 
record being written at all. A "good sleeper" is 
apt to drop off to sleep again before he has at- 
tempted to do it, and an indifferent or "bad 
sleeper" naturally dreads the complete awakening 
and probable loss of further sleep if he exerts him- 
self to turn on a light and write down his dream. 

There is a real difficulty, moreover, in ensuring 
that the first action of the mind on awaking from 
sleep is concentrated on recalling the dream and 
on nothing else. No other thought must be al- 
lowed a foothold until this has been done. To en- 
sure success other ideas must be excluded; for at 
the moment when the mind is still only half re- 
leased from the influence of sleep it will naturally 
turn instantly to whatever has been the preoccupa- 
tion of the previous day. If we have gone to sleep 
intent on some specially absorbing thought, that 
thought, unless kept in check, is sure to come be- 
tween us and the dream, and to efface the recollec- 
tion of it, however vivid it may have been. The 
memory of the clearest dream will not survive for 
more than a moment the intrusion of such a domi- 
nant waking thought; almost instantaneously the 
dream impression is destroyed. The best way that 
I know to guard against this, and to make sure of 
recapturing it, is to determine firmly overnight 
that nothing shall be allowed to intervene, and that 
the dream — whatever its nature — shall be recalled 
directly we wake. The command thus given over- 



DREAM RECORDING 57 

night will under ordinary circumstances be obeyed 
without difficulty, and the dream scenes can be re- 
traced. 

There are, however, some conditions which make 
it much harder to achieve this success. If the 
thought that fills the mind by day is an unusually 
absorbing or anxious one, it will actually awaken 
us from sleep by its insistence, and then no reso- 
lution made over-night will suffice to quell it or to 
put it on one side. When we are awakened in this 
manner, it may be practically impossible to remem- 
ber the dream, and its memory will probably elude 
us. 

Sometimes also when I have tried very vigor- 
ously to remember a dream the impression of which 
is nebulous, only certain detached floating frag- 
ments of it will come back. Dimly I remember 
something of it. I have a recollection of skating; 
of swift movement on the dark surface of a frozen 
river. A recollection of tall trees overhanging the 
ice comes back only to fade away again like a "dis- 
solving view," and, in the effort to hold fast the 
memory that slips away so quickly, I have fallen 
into an error that I find to be always a fatal one if 
a dream is to be remembered; I have repeated to 
myself in words — not aloud, but mentally — "I was 
skating on the frozen river, tall trees were arched 
having been conceived in words, instead of seeing 

overhead " but then immediately, the thought 

the dream scene as a picture, I see in front of me 
the words visualised and written as it were before 



58 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

my eyes. They may be written in black letters on 
a white background, or in white letters on a dark 
ground, but they effectually blot out the dream that 
I should be watching. The words may next begin 
to repeat themselves vocally in the ear of the mind 
as a tune repeats itself and "runs in one's head." 
Directly the mind vocalises or visualises words in 
this way they always oust the pictured scenes of 
the dream, and I know by experience that these are 
irrevocably lost and that no effort will recapture 
them. 

There are certain classes of dreams which are 
not easy to record, however soon one may try to 
write them down. I mean the dreams in which the 
dreamer passes from one personality into another. 
Just as a magic lantern picture fades away on the 
screen and another instantly takes its place, so our 
actual individuality changes into another, and so 
also does the individuality of the other actors in 
the dream. A. starts with me, but B. insensibly 
takes his place. I may not even know when the 
change has happened, and though the dream may 
work out into a 'coherent and rational story, the 
dreamer may in the course of it be two or three 
persons with different histories, characters and as- 
sociations. The scene and surroundings of the 
dream may also change in the same fashion: my 
Wiltshire home fades into the semblance of another 
house, a house whose threshold I have not crossed 
for twenty years, and it in turn may give place to 
the unfamiliar rooms of a strange mansion that I 



DREAM RECORDING 59 

have never seen. How can we retrace and record 
all these changes? above all when the dream itself 
shifts, and a second dream, wholy distinct, which 
I will call the "B" dream, is superimposed on the 
first; the "B" dream running side by side with the 
"A" dream. Sometimes the "B" dream is the 
stronger and takes the place of the other; it is then 
the one that it is easiest to remember in the morn- 
ing, but sometimes the "B" dream, after persisting 
for a time, fades out and the "A" dream may be 
carried on. Sometimes also, after a very brief 
waking time, if one falls asleep again, the "B" 
dream having disappeared, the "A" dream starts 
afresh from the point where it left off. 

It is always very difficult to recall or to describe 
these changes. In all these cases I think that our 
notes of dreams must be made very promptly and, 
except in very clear-cut and well-defined dreams, 
some blanks must of necessity be left where recol- 
lection breaks down or becomes hazy. The follow- 
ing is such a note : 

I was sitting in an arm-chair turning over the 
leaves of a largish book. Its pages were square in 
shape and showed a wide margin, especially at the 
top of each page where title headings were printed ; 
the book was printed in very clear black type. I 
turned over the pages and saw that it contained 
three stories — "All rather morbid subjects," I 
thought — and as I read on my dream changed and 
I became one of the characters in the first story. 
It was about a husband and a wife and was rather 



60 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

a prosy narrative, but I remember little of the 
events of it or of the part I played in it, for I 
thought it dull, and in my capacity as reader I 
turned over the pages to read the second story. 

This was concerned with a murder — a murder 
that had taken place before the story opened. The 
man who had committed it was convinced, for rea- 
sons that seemed to him wholly adequate, that he 
was guiltless, and merited no blame for what he 
had done. I slipped then and there into the person 
of this man. I remember passionately justifying 
to myself and to God the righteousness of the act 
that I had committed. I never felt more certain 
of anything in my life than I felt then, that my 
conscience was clear of guilt, and that the dreadful 
deed that I had done had been right. It was all 
intensely real to me. I remembered the murder- 
er's haunted journey described in "Oliver Twist.' ' 
"People who write about a murderer's mind can 
know very! little (about it," I thought. Again I 
turned over a page — "Oh, but these stories are 
very morbid," I was saying when I woke. 

In another of these dreams of changing identity 
I found myself in the big class-room of a higher 
elementary school in London. Children were sit- 
ting all round me at their desks, and I was a poor 
child like the rest, newly admitted from a lower 
grade school, and feeling very forlorn and shy. I 
thought that they all knew more than I did and had 
more confidence in themselves. I was sitting un- 
occupied at my desk, a copy open in front of me, 



DREAM RECORDING 61 

and books. No one had given me directions what 
to do, and I began to write the "copy," bnt the let- 
ters that I wrote were so badly formed that I felt 
ashamed, and looked instead into the books. After 
a time the headmaster came to me and asked how I 
"had employed the last hour." Alas! I had 
nothing to show. "Ah!" he said, "that is our 
little test to see how far you can organise your 
own work, and use your time." "But you didn't 
tell me," I said, "and it's my first day." He 
smiled in a superior way and began to give a lesson 
to the class. "Where do you all live?" he asked 
in the course of it. "Hammersmith," said one 
child, "Chelsea," said another. "Wootton Bas- 
sett," said I, and I thought they all smiled. "I am 
not nearly as grand as they are," I thought. 
"They are all very superior to me." The class 
was then summoned to go out, and the headmaster 
led us for a long walk, taking us, as he said, for an 
"educational expedition" to see the beautiful old 
library of one of the Inns of Court. 

The ancient room had lately been redecorated 
with modern wooden panelling, and the master ex- 
plained in his professional manner, how beautifully 
it had been done, and at how great a cost. I could 
see at once that the panelling was rather poor, of 
the wrong period for the room, and made of indif- 
ferent wood. "Does he really think that good?" 
I asked in a low voice of my neighbour. With this 
attitude of criticism I ceased to be the school-child 
and became my own self. I then recognised with a 



62 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

little dismay that the person to whom I had made 
my whispered criticism was one of the judges of 
the High Court, who must, it flashed across my 
mind, probably have been one of those who was re- 
sponsible, directly or indirectly, for the choice of 
the panelling. "What a 'gaffe' I have made," I 
thought ; but he was a very charming judge, and he 
only laughed and said, "It was thought rather good 
at the time." "But isn't it like the dull decora- 
tions inside the House of Commons?" I sug- 
gested. "Yes," he replied, rather ruefully, "I 
suppose it is, but I believe we made your husband 
subscribe to it, for he was a member of this Inn, 
you know." "I expect you did," I said, and as we 
sat talking I noticed that the panels in question 
were really only of deal, but cunningly "grained," 
so as to look like old oak. The schoolmaster was 
standing near and, as I felt a distaste for his ex- 
planations, and was attracted by the crowd, I wan- 
dered away and mingled with the other guests who 
filled the rooms. I was now wearing a rose-col- 
oured dress of silk that fell in full folds to my feet; 
it seemed to me beautiful and stately, but very un- 
like the sheath-like fashionable dresses that other 
women were wearing. "I haven't worn a rose-col- 
oured dress for years and years," I thought; "no 
wonder this is old-fashioned, it must have been ly- 
ing by so long!" "You must come back with us 
at once," said the schoolmaster, coming up from 
behind me ; and instantly I had turned into the child 
again in its short, shabby brown frock, hating going 



DREAM RECORDING 63 

back with the other children, hating the long tire- 
some walk back to school. The Temple Gardens 
had changed into a wide common, and I skipped 
round various big clumps of brambles, edging away 
as far as I could from the master's flow of improv- 
ing talk. The child's mind was mine again, and 
mine was the child's rather scornful attitude to- 
wards all "grand" attire. "I couldn't possibly 
have skipped like this in that long pink dress," I 
thought. 

I have often written down a dream when I have 
waked at a very early morning hour. After a while 
I have slept again, and on re-awakening have found 
that almost all recollection of the dream that I had 
previously recorded had so faded that I could recall 
only the barest outlines of it. The record of even 
the shortest most vivid dreams must therefore be 
made immediately on first awakening. The follow- 
ing is such a note of an early morning dream : 

June, 1913. 

A Dream of George Borrow 

I dreamed that a great prize had been offered in 
the Westminster Gazette for an essay competition. 
The subject of the essay was to be "The Books 
found in a Guest-chamber on a Week-end Visit." 
I was on my way to a country house, and I won- 
dered what books I should actually find in the bed- 
room that I should occupy in the house to which I 



64 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

was going. . . . The big country house that I came 

to was like and I was taken upstairs on my 

arrival to a room which I recognised as one in 
which I had several times slept on visits there. 
With my thoughts running on the essay I went 
quickly to the bookshelf and looked eagerly at its 
contents. There was a little row of books. Those 
that I glanced at first were familiar to me, books 
that I had read, novels I think, but I did not look 
at them much, for they were of no use for my 
special purpose, for the essay which was absorbing 
my thoughts. I do not even remember what they 
were; but I found towards the end of the shelf a 
single volume entitled "Candide." Opening it, I 
found a short preface which stated that this was a 
quite newly discovered volume, hitherto unpub- 
lished, and of remarkable interest; a continuation, 
in fact, of " Candide 's" story. I wondered if this 
might not serve my turn and provide stuff for the 
essay. I thought that it might, and began to turn 
over its pages, when my eye fell on the last two 
volumes standing in the little row. They were 
dark-blue books, lettered in gold, and their title ran 
"Mr. Petulengro, Vol. I, and Mr. Petulengro, Vol. 
II." "Oh, wonderful and delightful discovery!" 
I thought; "imagine finding two perfectly new 
books by Borrow! A new 'Lavengro' and an un- 
read and hitherto unheard-of 'Romany Rye'! 
How unexpected and how enchanting ! Could it be a 
mistake?" — and I eagerly opened the two blue vol- 
umes. No, the promise held good. Here on the 



DREAM RECORDING 65 

first pages that I looked at were the familiar 
names, Jasper Petulengro, Mrs. Petulengro, Ur- 
sula. . . . Chapter headings, too, there were that 
seemed familiar, but that yet were all new! . . . 
The opening of my essay began to frame itself in 
my mind. The sentences with which it should 
begin, and in which I should tell of my discovery to 
the world, came quite readily, and I repeated them 
over to myself, though the importance of the fifty- 
guinea prize faded quite away in comparison with 
the excitement of the discovery that I had made. 
But then — alas! the dark-blue volumes themselves 
began to fade. I tried hard to keep them, but in 
vain; and I woke up to find that my favourite row 
of " bedside books" near at hand contained indeed 
the familiar slim green volumes which I knew so 
nearly by heart, but that "Mr. Petulengro, Vol. I, 
and Mr. Petulengro, Vol. II, ' ' had disappeared with 
my dream. 

I have been obliged to illustrate these studies of 
dreaming by notes of my own dreams. This has 
been unavoidable, because actual experience has 
been their foundation, and experience is my only 
qualification for writing on this subject. Where I 
could obtain records made by friends I have done 
so, but this has not been often, because few people 
will make these notes immediately on awaking from 
sleep, and records made after the lapse of some 
hours are of comparatively little value. An apol- 
ogy must, however, be made for using my own 



66 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

dreams in this way. We have all suffered at times 
from having to listen to the; recital of dreams, 
which, though of scanty interest to the hearer, 
doubtless still possess for the teller some of the 
humour and the charm that they seemed to have 
in the night. Somewhat imperfectly remembered, 
and narrated in the cold light of day, these poor 
shadows of dreams convey none of their original 
glamour. No doubt from the earliest ages the same 
thing has happened; dreams have been dreamed, 
and have been re-told, and have wearied their hear- 
ers. Eighteen hundred years ago Epictetus laid 
down for his pupils the sound rule, which one 
amongst them evidently laid to heart and recorded : 
"Beware that thou never tell thy dreams, for not- 
withstanding thou mayst take pleasure in reciting 
the dreams of the night, the company will take little 
pleasure in hearing them." The moral, though a 
salutary one, now as it was then, is a discouraging 
maxim for a writer on dreams; but the reader, on 
the other hand, who is now duly forewarned, has a 
clear advantage over an unwilling listener, since 
it lies entirely within his own choice whether he 
reads, or whether he skips, the written dream. 



CHAPTER V 

DREAM MEMORY, DREAM IMAGINATION AND DREAM REASON 

Memory begets Judgment and Fancy: Judgment begets the 
strength and structure, and Fancy begets the ornaments of a 
Poem. — Hobbes, Leviathan. 

Some of the difficulties that we meet with in re- 
membering onr dreams have been described, and 
the part that memory plays in the process of re- 
calling and recording them. The materials ont of 
which dreams are built up, and the part taken in 
their building by memory, imagination, and by 
other mental faculties, must now be considered. 

The basis of all our dreams is furnished by mem- 
ory from things that have been seen, heard and re- 
membered. In the dream state, memory is char- 
acterised by greatly increased vigour and often a 
scene casually glanced at in the course of a journey, 
and half or quite forgotten as we hurry by in rail- 
way or motor, will reproduce itself in our dreams 
with a wealth of remembered detail and with a pre- 
cision that was absent from the original fugitive 
impression, and may remain imprinted on the 
dream memory for years, a picture unfaded by 
time. A thousand such impressions, which at the 
moment hardly seem to make any mark on our 

67 



68 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

minds, reappear in this way with extreme distinct- 
ness. "It is a strange but undoubted fact that 
the memory can be charged with lasting impres- 
sions of things seen which pass through the visual 
sense unnoticed and unknown of it." 1 

If memory acts as the builder, the provider of 
the material from which dreams are made, imagina- 
tion may be looked upon as their architect. Imagi- 
nation transforms all these remembered facts and 
impressions, and combines them afresh, using them 
to create for us totally new surroundings, but it 
does not, and cannot, act without that basis of ex- 
perience that is supplied by memory. It makes 
free use of all that we have gleaned from travel, 
from books, from things heard; but we do not — at 
least I certainly do not in my dreams — conceive of 
a world that is outwardly very unlike our own, or 
of beings of a new and wholly different order from 
ourselves. Even the gifts and accomplishments 
which we acquire only in our dreams, and which 
may not be ours by day, are possessed by other 
men and women. Gifts of music, of beautiful mo- 
tion, of oratory, may be ours only in sleep, and like 
supermen we may master the hardest of these 
things with effortless ease, but they are all gifts 
that belong to men like ourselves, things which men 
of our own race have done and can do. Our pow- 
ers of flying, and of overcoming distances of time 
and space in our dreams, are the exceptions to this 
rule. These are powers which belong to no mortal 

i F. Greenwood, "Imagination in Dreams." 



MEMORY, IMAGINATION, REASON 69 

y day, and it is perhaps for that very reason that 
ve hold these dreams so dear. As a general rule 
we do not in our dreams even invent new trees or 
new flowers, and although the combinations made by 
imagination result sometimes in dream scenes that 
have all the charm of originality and of a certain 
strange foreignness, still our dream world is on the 
whole a world resembling in most of its outward 
characteristics the world we live in, and in the 
greater number of our dreams even the details of 
that familiar world are faithfully reproduced. 

No change that takes place in any of the mental 
faculties during sleep is more remarkable or more 
certainly attested than the heightening of the 
faculty of imagination. The great increase of 
imaginative force that is conferred upon us is what 
gives our dreams their greatest charm, the vivid- 
ness of our dream images being in many cases far 
greater than that of the mental images that we can 
form by day. I believe that the dream mind has in 
itself a much more intense power of imaginative 
vision than our normal mind possesses. It is, 
moreover, free, as many writers on dreams have 
noted, to work out its effects without the interfer- 
ence of contrary or irrelevant ideas that hamper 
the imaginative force of the waking mind. By 
day the imagination is often distracted by other 
thoughts, and cannot fully concentrate itself upon 
a single image; it works in a stricter subjection to 
the reasoning faculty, and in obedience also to the 
laws that govern our universe and, only when the 



70 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

memory of these is partly lifted off in sleep, the 
imagination is free to create new conditions which 
do not depend upon these laws. Difficulties, which 
must seem insuperable to the normal mind, which is 
obliged to think of things as happening in time, and 
to regard everything under the conditions of time 
and space that are familiar to us, are no longer 
insurmountable in dreams. Men have built up 
"laws which seem to correspond with the phenom- 
ena of succession and slow sequence which are part 
of our observations of nature." 1 In our dreams 
we pass directly into a condition where our ordi- 
nary conceptions of the sequence of time and rela- 
tive distance are done away with, where these laws 
no longer exist for us, and where entirely different 
conditions prevail. Distance is annihilated in our 
dreams, which take no account of the continents 
that may intervene between us and the remote spot 
to which our thoughts may fly, and to which we may 
be instantly transported as on the Princess Ba- 
doura's magic carpet. In this respect, at least, the 
world of dreams differs fundamentally from the 
world we know by day. 

The thought of a certain lake in Kashmir flashes 
into my dream mind, and instantly I find myself 
there, lying as I often do, in the reed- thatched 
house-boat in which I live and voyage on the lake. 
A fractional part of the journey thither may or 
may not come into the dream, but the preliminary 
of travelling is, as often as not, altogether omitted. 

i Bishop Westcott. 



MEMORY, IMAGINATION, REASON 71 

One has only to think of a place, and one is there. 
Sir Philip Sidney was perhaps thinking of such 
dreams as these when he wrote of imagination as 
the faculty "that flies from one Indies to the 
other." Just as completely as our conceptions of 
distances disappear in dreams, so are our concep- 
tions of time swept away. The thought of some 
historic event may carry us back in a dream across 
the centuries, and make us live for a little while in 
another age, the dream imagination accomplishing 
for us in an instant the task that the historian 
achieves in many pages. Like the clairvoyant de- 
scribed by M. Maeterlinck, we "do not feel 
what the future is, or distinguish it from other 
senses." x 

De Quincey describes how in such dreams he saw 
". . . a crowd of ladies, a festival and dances. 
And I heard it said, or I said it to myself, i These 
are English ladies from the unhappy times of 
Charles I. These are the wives and daughters of 
those who met in peace, and sat at the same tables, 
and were allied by marriage or by blood; and yet 
after a certain day in August, 1642, never smiled 
upon each other again, nor met but in the field of 
battle; and at Marston Moor, at Newbury, or at 
Naseby, cut asunder all ties of blood by the cruel 
sabre, and washed away in blood the memory of 
ancient friendship.' The ladies danced, and looked 
as lovely as the court of George IV. Yet I knew, 
even in my dream, that they had been in the grave 

1 Maeterlinck, "The Unknown Guest." 



72 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

for nearly two centuries. This pageant would sud- 
denly dissolve; and at a clapping of hands, would 
be heard the heart-quaking sound of Consul Ro- 
manum: and immediately came sweeping by in gor- 
geous paludaments, Paulus or Marius, girt round 
by a company of centurions, with the crimson tunic 
hoisted on a spear, and followed by the alalagmos 
of the Roman legions." 

In dreams such transitions from time present 
backwards to time long past, and onwards to time 
yet to come, are lightly made ; they present no dif- 
ficulties to the imagination that is not bound by the 
laws that govern our thoughts of time by day. 
The following is taken from a short note of such a 
transition dream, dated January, 1915 : 

In my dream I am looking across the grasslands 
and cornfields of a countryside that seems half, but 
only half, familiar to me. By degrees I realise 
that I am looking at the actual fields of Waterloo. 
As I gaze at them I see a thin line of men hurrying 
over the crest of the low, grey hill in front of me. 
They are coming over at a running pace, and I can 
see the ancient red uniforms of the British soldiers. 
Waterloo is being fought and I am there watching 
it! And a guide standing by my side, like the 
chorus in a Greek play, is telling me what the dis- 
tant scenes of the battle mean. From very, very 
far away the faint sound of cheering comes across 
the plain; the guide tells me to listen and to hear 
whether the sound has ''the long-drawn-out note 
of the British hurrah," or if it is the sharp punctu- 



MEMORY, IMAGINATION, REASON 73 

ated note of the Hocks, that would signify the com- 
ing of Blucher's army. 

A few seconds later the scene of the dream and 
its century had changed, and it was carried for- 
ward into a future which, at the moment when this 
note was written, seemed infinitely far off; for it 
now took place in the public square of a strange 
foreign city, where under innumerable flags, and 
with triumphant music, and a procession of the 
soldiers of all nations, the Peace which was at last 
to end the Great War was being celebrated. 

The annihilation by the imagination of the sense 
of time, separating us from the past and from the 
future, is a mental operation very similar to that 
which imagination accomplishes for us when we try 
to reconstruct an event in history. There are 
pages in which great historians have lighted up 
historic scenes, giving them the force of living re- 
ality; but, left to ourselves, how few of us can im- 
part life to history in this way? Memory supplies 
the materials for both the mental picture that we 
try to form and for the dream picture, but I think 
that the impression made upon the mind by the 
dream is often far more vivid than the other. No 
written records, however, of such dreams give any 
idea of the extraordinary sense of reality that they 
impart at the moment; and unfortunately many of 
us who see vividly in our dreams are unable to 
record our dreams at all, or are but little able to 
convey any adequate impression of their force by 
means of written words. 



74 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

Amongst dreams which have been clearly sug- 
gested by a definite act of memory are the numer- 
ous dreams which have their origin in words or 
phrases that have been preserved by memory in the 
hinterland of our thoughts, and which start into 
prominence as soon as we are asleep. 

Memory has only to bring up from these stores, 
and to suggest to the dream imagination, some re- 
membered word, some place-name or some familiar 
phrase, and the idea thus suggested is at once 
seized upon, and the imagination begins its con- 
structive work. A sentence, for instance, which is 
familiar to us, is often the opening from which a 
whole dream story will grow. The following is the 
briefest example that I can find in my notes of a 
dream that grew in this way out of a remembered 
phrase : 

November, 1916. 

I was standing in the midst of a great crowd in 
the open space of the Mall in front of Buckingham 
Palace. Like the rest of the world, I had come out 
to see the remnant of the army of Belgium who had 
survived the Great War, and who, peace having 
been declared, had been brought to London to re- 
ceive the welcome of our King and people. The 
crowd about me was so dense that for a time I 
could only see the shoulders of the people near me, 
but presently it parted a little, and I could see an 
army of short dark men, dressed in splendid uni- 
forms with touches of scarlet about them, whilst 



MEMORY, IMAGINATION, REASON 75 

others were in uniforms almost covered with gold. 
Some one standing just behind me (as the 
" guide" so often stands) said, "Why, they are all 
chamarre d'or, like the Guards' band at a State 
dinner or ball in the Palace," but I was so sorely 
disappointed that I turned away almost in tears. 
"Oh, but I did not come to see this," I said; "these 
men look merely like dressed-up dolls!" and in- 
deed they were not in the least like the war-worn 
soldiers whom I had pictured, and who had fought 
and suffered so long. In the sharpness of my dis- 
appointment I awoke. I began as usual writing 
down the dreams of the night. Something about 
this particular dream haunted me, something that 
was certainly missing from it that would explain it, 
and I lay awake wondering — whilst some other 
part of my mind was meanwhile at work, actively 
searching for the missing connection or idea — for a 
refrain which I felt somehow echoed through the 
dream itself, but which I could not recall. And 
then suddenly it flashed back to me in the words: 
"But what went ye out for to see? A man clothed 
in soft raiment? Behold, they that are clothed in 
soft raiment dwell in kings' houses. But what 
went ye out for to see?" Kings' houses — those 
were the familiar words round which the dream 
had crystallised, and the origin of it at once became 
clear. The crowd outside the King's palace! 
What had we come out to see? The dream imagi- 
nation did the rest, and made up the brief dream 
story. 



76 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

Just in the same way a place-name often makes 
the starting-point from which a dream of travel 
originates. 

I had asked in a furniture shop one day the name 
of a folding tea-table, and had been told that it was 
a " Sutherland table." "Why Sutherland?" I 
had idly wondered at the moment. In my sleep the 
memory of the word recurred, but it was no longer 
associated with the idea of the table, but with the 
map of Northern Scotland, and the place of Suth- 
erland in it, and, as so often happens in a dream, no 
sooner had I thought of the name than I found my- 
self travelling thither. 

I was in a large railway carriage arranged not at 
all on the plan of our own carriages, but more as I 
imagine an American car to be arranged. I noted 
the curious sleeping-berths that looked foreign and 
unfamiliar to me. It seemed that the journey was 
taking us to the extreme north of Scotland. An 
Italian woman of the poorer class was travelling 
with a party of friends, some of them foreigners, 
one of whom talked to me in English. He ex- 
plained to me that their personal luggage and all 
their household furniture had been sent on by a 
cheaper conveyance. I saw from their shapes that 
the bundles that the Italian woman had with her, 
both on and under the seat, were evidently the 
cooking utensils from which probably she could not 
bear to be parted ; these were tied up in large hand- 
kerchiefs. She had no change of clothes or any 
travelling comforts with her, and the thought 



MEMORY, IMAGINATION, REASON 77 

crossed my mind that I too must be rather travel- 
stained, for the journey had already lasted some 
days and nights. Being tired, my thoughts flew 
longingly on to my destination . . . and lo ! I had 
arrived there! ... I found myself sitting on the 
lawn outside a large house at a tea-table round 
which my hosts and their numerous guests were 
gathered and were talking together. My hostess 
was describing graphically a long motor-tour that 
they had lately made, which had taken them to a 
place in the neighbouring county of Sutherland, to 
a wonderful castle, in which the owner had collected 
together a number of priceless Italian pictures, and 
a library of books that would make the fortune of 
any European collector. How these extraordinary 
treasures had been obtained was a mystery which 
my host and hostess did nothing to solve. My host 
whispered the word "loot," but evidently did not 
wish to divulge any more than he could help about 
either the owner of the collection or the place where 
it was kept. The names of both person and place 
were hurriedly mentioned, but in an aside — and so 
murmured that I could not catch them. I asked 
for them to be repeated, but again they were so 
slurred over that I had no better success. I tried 
various devices to get them repeated afresh more 
clearly, but in vain. The owner's name, as I 
caught it imperfectly, sounded like Mor. I asked 
for an atlas, thinking that a study of the county of 
Sutherland might enable me to find out approxi- 
mately the whereabouts of the strange castle and 



78 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

mysterious collection, for I now felt determined 
that whatever happened I would go there and in- 
vestigate these treasures for myself. But when- 
ever I introduced the subject I was quietly put off 
by my hosts, and whilst I was still making plans an 
interruption occurred. Alas! I never found the 
way to the wonderful castle, although the dream of 
which this was the opening was a very long one. 

A fresh impression too easily distracts our atten- 
tion in a dream, and imagination beguiles us from 
the track we were following, and leads us down 
each new path that opens before us. 

Although I find that in my own dreams a consecu- 
tive story is often pursued fairly steadily to its 
end, the experience of many people whom I have 
asked about dreams is that the centre of interest is 
continually shifting, and that a dream story is there- 
fore very seldom complete or consistent. The 
power of continued close attention appears in many 
cases to be missing; and in this respect, at any rate, 
the imagination seems to work in sleep without the 
check that keeps it steadily directed on to one line 
of thought by day. 

It is often assumed that in sleep all the mental 
faculties except imagination are dormant; and that 
the heightened powers that imagination acquires in 
dreams is due to the suspension of the other facul- 
ties that control it by day. I have tried to show 
that will-power does not come to a standstill, and 
that memory acts with increased force, and it 



MEMORY, IMAGINATION, REASON 79 

should not be difficult to prove that in most dreams, 
if not in all, the reasoning faculty also operates 
with varying degrees of power. Indeed, unless we 
assume such co-operation, the construction and se- 
quence of many dreams could not possibly be ac- 
counted for. The making of a coherent story in a 
dream requires the participation of the same func- 
tions of mind as those that enable us to construct 
such a story by day. The great diversity of 
dreams is seen in the fact that, whilst some show in 
a very high degree the powers of reasoning and 
constructive ability, others would clearly take a 
very low place in such a scale; but I believe that 
in all our dreams we make some attempt to reason. 
Even in the very incoherent dreams, which are the 
dreams of more or less disordered sleep, in which 
the restraint that is generally imposed by the reason 
upon the imagination seems at first sight to have 
been lifted off, if we consider the matter attentively 
we see that reason is not really wholly in abeyance. 
Our reasoning in such disordered dreams may be 
very illogical, very perverse, but the reason is nev- 
ertheless at work trying hard to synthesise the scat- 
tered incoherent expressions that come floating up 
to the surface of the mind when we sleep. Exactly 
where the province of reason ends, and that of 
imagination begins, I do not know: the question 
must be left to philosophers to settle, for students 
of dreams are certainly not agreed about it. 
Whilst one writer looks on dreams as being simply 
the outcome of man's " strenuous instinct to rea- 



80 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

son," another sees them as the creation of imagina- 
tion freed to a great extent from the control of the 
reasoning faculty. The truth probably is that we 
judge in this matter, as in so many others, largely 
according to the nature of our own experience, and 
see but one side of a shield which has its golden as 
well as its silver side. A man whose dream life 
is very full and imaginative realises chiefly that 
side of dreaming; dreams are to such men what 
they were to Keats, a " great key to golden palaces 
. . . ay, to all the mazy world of silvery enchant- 
ment." On the other hand, a man of scientific 
training and habit of thought, whose dream lif e has 
perhaps little in common with the visions of the 
poet, and who has learned to look upon all forms 
of mental activity as reducible at last to reasoning, 
will naturally attribute his dreams to the operation 
of that faculty. But both aspects may surely be true. 
In dreams, as in waking life, imagination is con- 
tinually forming in our minds new images which 
have not been previously experienced, or experi- 
enced only partially or in different combinations; 
and reason is equally busy all the time synthesis- 
ing into unity these images and concepts of the 
mind. We do not always recognise it as reason in 
our dreams, because its results are so illogical, the 
reasoning that it achieves is so bad, and we are ac- 
customed to judge of reason by its capacity to draw 
logical inferences. But that is where waking rea- 
son and dream reason differ widely from each 
other; for many of the facts and memories that 



MEMORY, IMAGINATION, REASON 81 

help us to arrive at logical conclusions by day are 
absent from our dream consciousness, and thus rea- 
son, working upon insufficient materials, comes to 
conclusions that are false and absurd. 

Eeasoning that is logical, as far as the facts in 
the possession of the dream mind allow it to be so, 
is a feature of most dreams, and indeed it seems as 
if, in the production of every dream, reason must 
take some share. Besides the general offices that 
it performs in all our dreams, levelling difficulties 
and explaining away inconsistencies that arise, it 
appears to be responsible for the curious debates 
that so often take place in them when some one in 
the dream advances arguments which we try to 
meet. We are, I conclude, really furnishing both 
argument and reply. My notes of dreams are full 
of such conversations, and often, like Dr. Johnson, 
in the dream that he described, I have the worst of 
the argument and have to fall back on admiring the 
readiness of my dream opponent. Sometimes, but 
more rarely, I appear to be wiser or more convinc- 
ing than he is. The logical faculty is not very 
strongly developed in me, but it does not seem to 
have quite deserted me in the following odd little 
dream : 

I was sitting by the side of a young man who was 
explaining to me his serious financial troubles. I 
did not know him; he was a red-haired, plain but 
pleasant youth, and was clearly very much wor- 
ried. He had before him a paper on which there 
were written columns of figures, at which I looked 



82 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

over his shoulder. These were, it appeared, the 
sums, at varying rates per cent., that he had ar- 
ranged to pay to money lenders. 

"Can you possibly explain to me how much I've 
got to pay, and how much I've got left?" asked the 
youth. 

"I don't understand a bit," I said, "but as far 
as I can make out from this paper you seem to have 
covenanted to pay a hundred per cent, per annum." 

"Yes," he said, "that's about it, I expect. 
Doesn't it seem to you right and fair?" 

I felt dreadfully puzzled (as I always am by fig- 
ures). 

"I don't know," I said, "but I think that seems 
all right for once, doesn't it? — a hundred per cent, 
once, but not a hundred per cent, per annum " 

"Oh," said the young man, "by ! Is that 

how it strikes you?" 

In dreams of argument such as these, different 
faculties of the mind seem to be at work behind the 
scenes, prompting and moving in a life-like man- 
ner the puppets that occupy the dream stage. 

Confronted by our own wisdom in this way, 
which makes it seem not our own but another's, we 
may, when we awake, have the agreeable sense that 
the best of the argument, the brightest of the re- 
plies, have really been ours ; a great advantage pos- 
sessed by the dream over real life, in which the con- 
sciousness that ours has only been at best I 'esprit de 
I'escalier, so often effectually keeps in check any 
tendency to undue satisfaction with ourselves. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE ' ' SUPER-DREAM " 

There are some who claim to have lived longer and more 
richly than their neighbours; when they lay asleep they claim 
they were still active; and among the treasures of memory that 
all men review for their amusement, these count in no second 
place the harvests of their dreams. — R. L. Stevenson, A Chapter 
on Dreams. 

A more curious and much rarer type of dream 
than any of those that have hitherto been described, 
but which is attested by perfectly reliable wit- 
nesses, is what may be called the super-dream; in 
which the dream mind, working beyond its ordi- 
nary level of capacity, has actually solved prob- 
lems that have defeated the efforts of the normal 
mind in its waking hours. The instance of Condor- 
cet, who in such a dream solved a mathematical 
problem, the answer to which he had vainly sought 
by day, has been often quoted; and Condorcet's 
experience was almost exactly repeated in the case 
of my father Nevil Story-Maskelyne. The mathe- 
matical problem that had baffled him came into the 
treatise on crystallography on which he was en- 
gaged. After working at it for many hours he was 
obliged to leave it unsolved and to go to bed. He 
fell into a deep sleep, and in the course of a long 
dream the answer to the problem came to him. 

83 



84 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

He often described this to me and told me how in 
an early honr of the morning he awoke and wrote 
down the solution that the dream had given him, 
and anxiously tested its correctness. 

A friend writes of her very similar experience in 
solving mathematical difficulties in her sleep. "On 
more than one occasion when studying for examina- 
tions I worked for two or three days at a problem 
without arriving at the solution, and finally worked 
it in my dreams with such clearness that I was able 
to write down the correct result quite easily on 
awaking. On occasions during my schooldays the 
same thing used to happen, and if I met with very 
hard sums and riders I used to put pencil and paper 
by my bedside so as to be ready to write down the 
answer if it came to me in my sleep." Henri 
Fabre, in his " Souvenirs Entomologiques," explains 
that sleep in his case was often a state which did not 
suspend the mind's activity but actually quickened 
it, and in sleep he was able at times to solve mathe- 
matical problems with which he had struggled 
by day. "A brilliant beacon flares up in my 
brain, and then I jump from my bed, light my lamp 
and write down the solution the memory of which 
would otherwise be lost; like flashes of lightning 
these gleams vanish as suddenly as they appear." 

These cases, though uncommon, are not isolated 
ones; other equally reliable witnesses have told of 
their similar experiences; and though these seem 
specially striking when the problems grappled with 
by the dream mind are the problems of such an ex- 



THE "SUPER-DREAM" 85 

act science as mathematics, there is nothing in their 
occurrence that is out of harmony with what we 
know, or with what the latest researches of science 
teach us, about the mental faculties in the dream 
state. Reason is, we believe, continually at work 
in dreams, and we know that in this state imagina- 
tion works with greatly increased powers. Imagi- 
nation is an essential element in the attainment of 
any great intellectual result; and progress in 
mathematical knowledge, as in all scientific re- 
search, has been largely due to "provisional ex- 
planations constructed by the imagination, such ex- 
planations being framed in accordance with known 
facts." One great difference between these " su- 
per-dreams" and the ordinary dream is that a suf- 
ficiently clear remembrance of essential facts is 
carried over into the dream state to enable the dream 
reason to draw correct inferences, whereas in most 
dreams it has to work on more or less insufficient 
data and consequently often comes to wrong con- 
clusions. Armed with the necessary facts, reason 
in the super-dream works correctly and powerfully, 
and at the same time imagination supplies the other 
essential element that the thinker needs. Thought 
alone is not sufficient for most operations of the 
mind; imagination is also required. In every case 
of the kind that I have met with, the solution that 
has thus been arrived at in the dream seems to the 
dreamer not to be the product of his own reason- 
ing powers, but to be a conclusion arrived at inde- 
pendently of himself, like a light flashed on to his 



86 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

mind from without, illuminating the difficulty that 
had seemed hopeless to his normal, mind by day. 
This type of dream, with its strange faculty of in- 
sight or intuition, has been realised perhaps more 
often by men of letters than by men of science, al- 
though it must be in any case a rare experience. 
The dream in which Coleridge composed "Kubla 
Khan" may possibly be looked upon with some 
doubt, because in his case sleep was at times in- 
duced and influenced by opium, but there seems no 
reason to question the fact that the conception of 
the poem came to him in a dream, and that a part of 
it, at any rate, was written down from memory 
directly afterwards. Various instances of creative 
dreams have been related. A striking example of an 
original and very dramatic story which was entirely 
the creation of a dream was told me lately by a writer 
who has attained a distinguished place among mod- 
ern novelists. At the time when the dream oc- 
curred he was engaged on a book which was absorb- 
ing all his time and thoughts; about two-thirds of 
this had already been written, and it was making 
steady progress to completion, when one night he 
experienced a dream of extraordinary force and 
vividness. In this dream a story of a most dra- 
matic nature was partially unfolded, and on follow- 
ing nights it was continued and completed. He 
dreamed and re-dreamed the story. The whole plot, 
the scenes of the drama and its characters, were so 
clearly realised, and made upon the dreamer so in- 
sistent an impression, that he could not free him- 



THE " SUPER-DREAM " 87 

self from the memory of them; they came between 
him and his other work, and he was at last obliged 
to lay this on one side until he had fully written 
down the dream story. He is, he explained, a 
rather slow worker, attaining the effects that he 
seeks by dint of patient care, but when he began to 
write down the dream it seemed to be like a tale 
that was told to him rather than a thing of his own 
creation. The story as he wrote it certainly con- 
veys the impression, not of invented scenes and 
happenings, but rather of things that had actually 
been witnessed by the narrator. This may, how- 
ever, of course, be due, not to the curious manner 
in which it had its origin, but to the graphic power 
of the novelist. Very similar to his experience 
were the dream creations which were so fully de- 
scribed by Robert Louis Stevenson in his essay 
called "A Chapter on Dreams." 1 In this essay, 
which gives a most lucid account of his whole dream 
life, he described the process of inventive dreaming 
from which many of his stories originated. So 
completely did these dreams seem to him to be an 
inspiration from outside himself, the operation of 
faculties apart from the workings of his normal 
mind and working at a higher level, that he speaks 
of them as being the handiwork of the " Little 
People," Brownies of the mind, who — whilst he 
slept — bestirred themselves to construct and elabo- 
rate for him the plots of his stories, far better 
tales, he declared, than any that he could invent for 

i R. L. Stevenson, "Across the Plains." 



88 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

himself by day. He gives in this essay the out- 
lines of one such story, of which he says truly that 
it would be hard to better the dramatic effective- 
ness of its situations. The plot of the dream story 
hinged upon the hidden motive of the woman who 
played the leading part in the little drama ; and un- 
til its very end that secret was kept. 

"The dreamer . . . had no guess whatever at 
this motive — the hinge of the whole well-invented 
plot — until the instant of its highly dramatic decla- 
ration. It was not his tale; it was the Little 
People's! And observe; not only was the secret 
kept, the story was told with really guileful crafts- 
manship. ... I am awake now, and I know this 
trade; and yet I cannot better it . . . the more I 
think of it, the more I am moved to press upon the 
world my question, who are the Little People? 
They are near connections of the dreamer's, be- 
yond doubt. . . . They share plainly in his train- 
ing: they have plainly learned like him to build the 
scheme of a consistent story and to arrange emo- 
tion in progressive order; only I think they have 
more talent; and one thing is beyond doubt, they 
can tell him a story piece by piece, like a serial, 
and keep him all the while in ignorance of where 
they aim." 

What indeed are these " dream-builders"? If 
we could but answer this question satisfactorily, 
we should solve the most baffling problems of our 
dreams. This power of the dream mind not only 
to construct a dramatic story, but to conceal from 



THE "SUPER-DREAM" 89 

us till the very end the denouement to which the 
story led up, what a mystery it reveals ! How does 
this thing happen? We know that it does happen, 
for, though our own dreams are far from being 
such remarkable ones as those described by Steven- 
son, and though they lack all the craftsmanship and 
finish of his, yet we too have experienced the same 
thrill of wonder when a secret carefully hidden 
from us till the end has suddenly been disclosed. 

The suggestion made in the earlier part of this 
chapter as to the main difference between the ordi- 
nary dreams and super-dreams does not here suf- 
fice. It is inadequate to account for mental proc- 
esses such as these. For here, far more even than 
in our dreams of argument, a dual consciousness or 
personality seems to be present; here again the 
curious sense is felt that some one not quite one- 
self, some one with rather different faculties from 
one 's own, but yet an integral part of self, is at work, 
taking a hand in the business. Facts that we do 
not know are in his possession, and the answer to 
the riddle of the dream story is within the knowl- 
edge of this other self though it is hidden from our- 
selves. Stevenson realised that this other self was 
intimately related to the dreamer, trained as he 
himself was trained, but able, he believed, to do 
something which he himself could not do, or to do 
it better; and to this same mysterious other self I 
imagine that the mathematician also owes the 
dream solution of his problem. 

These and many equally curious and interesting 



90 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

experiences which are nowadays occupying the at- 
tention of men of science seem to require the as- 
sumption of a secondary consciousness existing 
side by side with our ordinary personal conscious- 
ness, and indeed, unless we can assume the presence 
of such a divided personality or consciousness, it 
seems almost impossible to conceive how certain 
processes of the mind are carried out in the dream 
state or in the hypnotic state. 

The consideration of this most difficult aspect of 
the subject belongs to a later chapter, and, although 
it can only be dealt with imperfectly by an observer 
who has not the necessary knowledge of psychol- 
ogy, it would be impossible to deal at all thoroughly 
with the question of dreams, unless this aspect is 
considered. 

Before passing on to other questions, it is curi- 
ous to note the attitude that many people, writers 
and others, adopt with regard to dream experi- 
ences, wmich, like those described above, are out- 
side the common range of experience, and which do 
not chance to have come under their own immediate 
observation. Dreamers who have actually had 
these uncommon experiences know from first-hand 
knowledge that, strange as they may seem, such 
dreams occur and must be taken into account when 
problems concerning the activity of the mind in 
sleep, or the possibility of a divided consciousness 
or dual personality in man, are considered. But 
whereas a man's careful and straightforward state- 
ment about the processes of his waking thoughts 



THE "SUPER-DREAM" 91 

would be accepted without questioning, it is more 
than likely that if he should make an equally care- 
ful statement about his dreams he will find that this 
is looked upon very doubtfully by his fellows. 
Even a philosopher like M. Bergson, having stated 
the theory that in general " dreams create noth- 
ing, ' ' finds it necessary to explain away the case of 
such creative dreams as Stevenson's by saying that 
the dreamer was probably in a psychical state in 
which it would have been difficult to say whether he 
were asleep or awake, for "when the mind creates, 
when it is capable of making the effort to organise 
and synthesise which is necessary in order to tri- 
umph over a difficulty, to solve a problem, or to 
produce a work of imagination, we are not really 
asleep." 1 This summary way of dealing with 
facts or records which clash awkwardly with 
theories is noted here only because this attitude is 
rather often found in books about dreaming, but it 
is a curious attitude to adopt towards Stevenson's 
very deliberate and very careful analysis of his 
dream life over a period of years. If in pursuing 
another study we found that carefully recorded facts 
did not conform to a theory that we had formed, 
we should probably concede that the theory might 
be either incorrect or not sufficiently elastic. 

"The question whether anything can be known is 
to be settled not by arguing but by trying," 2 and 
the inductive method of arriving at truth by means 

i Henri Bergson, "Revue Scientifique," Paris, June, 1901. 
2 Bacon, "Novum Organon." 



92 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

of experiment rather than by logic advocated by the 
great philosopher is still the method that it is safest 
to follow if our conclusions are to be sound. It is, 
of course, the absence of sufficient accurately re- 
corded facts concerning dreams that has made it 
natural that philosophers should build up their 
theories concerning them without an adequately 
wide foundation. And so once again we are 
brought round to the need for a clearing house of 
dreams, whose widely gathered stores of observa- 
tion would be available to correct or to confirm the 
theories about the working of the dream mind that 
science may hereafter form. 



CHAPTER VII 

SYMBOLISM IN DKEAMS AND THE SIGNIFICANCE OF DEEAMS 
IN TRADITION 

Our advanced ideas are really in great part but the latest 
fashion in ''definition" — a more accurate expression, by words in 
logy and ism, of sensations which men and women have vaguely 
grasped for centuries. — Thomas Hardy, Tess of the Tubervilles. 

The theory of the symbolic nature of dreams un- 
derlies the teaching of all modern psychology. 
The discovery of this curious characteristic of the 
dream mind was first made by Freud, and on it he 
laid great emphasis. In the course of his discov- 
eries in the unconscious he was the first to formu- 
late the theory that beneath the dream itself a sub- 
conscious process has been at work fashioning the 
conscious dream; and he insists further that every 
dream, if fully analysed, would be found to have a 
symbolic nature and to be always the allegorical 
representation of the fulfilment of a sex wish. 

I believe that there are indeed many dreams 
which are symbolic representations of some under- 
lying mental experience, some wish, or trouble, or 
some pleasanter thought which has occupied our 
mind by day, and which is transmitted by the dream 
mind. We can, if we analyse our dreams, trace in 
certain of them a symbolism under the figure of 
which such thoughts and moods seem to be repre- 

93 



94 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

sented; but my experience convinces me that it is 
not true to say that all dreams are symbolic, any 
more than we can accept as of universal truth the 
Freudian theory that they are all symbols of re- 
pressed desire. 

When I examine my own dreams I find that in the 
cases where these seem to be symbolic the symbol- 
ism appears generally to be of a simple and direct 
nature, relating the dream to some mood that I have 
experienced, or some problem that I have met with, 
and it is often fairly easy to trace this idea, which 
the dream represents in an allegorical form. In 
this modified sense it seems evident that many 
dreams are symbolical. 

The true Freudian psycho-analyst would not, 
however, be content with such an analysis as this; 
for he insists that every dream, if completely an- 
alysed, would be revealed as the symbolic fulfil- 
ment of a "wish" which is always a "sex wish." 
He would not accept the definition that "a dream 
may be the symbolical expression of almost any 
thought" 1 — a definition which perfectly sums up 
the conclusions to which my own limited experi- 
ence has led me. 

In the case of dreams whose form suggests that 
they may have a symbolic character, it is interest- 
ing to try to trace, with the help of our knowledge 
of our own mental experience, the underlying idea 
that the dream probably symbolises; and this idea, 
and the memories that help to make up the "mani- 

i Morton Prince, "The Unconscious," p. 221. 



SYMBOLISM IN DREAMS 95 

fest content" of the dream, can in many cases be 
easily recognised. We are, however, under an ob- 
vious disadvantage if we try further to apply the 
Freudian theories of analysis to our dreams, and 
to investigate their ''latent content"; for we are 
warned at the outset that it is difficult, if not prac- 
tically impossible, to trace this for ourselves, and 
to discern the repressed thoughts from which they 
spring; because the normal mind, whose office it is 
to suppress such thoughts from our consciousness, 
acts always as " censor," and forbids our becom- 
ing aware of them and prevents our recognising 
the secret impulses which dreams symbolise. 

"The work of the censor is so complete that the 
immoral, that is to say unsocial, nature of the 
wishes constantly striving for utterance is abso- 
lutely hidden by him from the dreamer's conscious 
life, and can be revealed only by psycho-analytic re- 
search. " * 

Only, it would seem, by way of the new confes- 
sional can we hope to arrive at the innermost truth 
about ourselves, and the process appears in some 
cases to be a somewhat tedious one, and possibly 
of doubtful usefulness. 2 

i Lay, "Man's Unconscious Conflict." 

2 The process of psycho-analysis varies in length "according to 
circumstances from one sitting to hundreds. Daily talks for eight 
months or a year may be necessary to resolve some of the problems 
brought by people who are physically sound, according to medical 
examination, while a single sitting has been known to remove a 
serious difficulty that has endured for years," — Lay, "Man's Un- 
conscious Conflict," p. 149. 



96 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

A mere student cannot weigh and judge all the 
evidence bearing on the "censor" theory, but a plea 
for the exercise of sober judgment and common 
sense in our study of this subject and the conclu- 
sions that we form, does not seem to be unneeded. 

It has been said that symbolism of a simple kind 
is evidently to be found in some dreams, represent- 
ing in a changed form a thought which has occupied 
our mind by day. In the following dream record 
the symbolism seems to be of a very direct nature : 

A little party of people were gathered together in 
a large room. It was night-time, lamps were 
lighted, and some of the older ones were playing 
"patience." I was sitting near the fire with a book 
reading, and looking out through the long windows 
which opened on to a wide lawn flooded with moon- 
light beyond which the arches of a cloister could be 
seen. A number of girls and boys were dancing 
on the lawn; as I watched the dancing figures I 
slipped away from "myself" and ran out to join 
them; I glanced back from the open window for a 
moment at the group under the lamplight, at the 
patience players, and at myself sitting sedately in 
my low chair with my book open on my knee. 

We danced hand in hand in a long chain running 
very lightly and fast, passing in and out of the 
shadows of the arches, and out into the moonlit 
spaces again. The lightness and slenderness of my 
body delighted me, and as I looked down at my feet 
I said, laughing, "The old ones by the fire would 



SYMBOLISM IN DREAMS 97 

think that these silk shoes were imich too thin for 
dancing at night upon the grass. ' r 

A youth danced by my side, but he was without 
importance in the dream and did not interest me; 
"only/' I thought, "I should not be at all in the 
movement if I were partnerless." A girl in the 
chain of dancers began to tell a story, another took 
up the recital, and so the dream went on. 

As a student of the works of Freud and his fol- 
lowers I fully realise the nature of the various inter- 
pretations' — most of them unpleasant — which may 
be read into this dream, the repressed thoughts and 
complexes to which it may be attributed. The ex- 
planation of it that I believe to be a true and 
sufficient one is of a simpler nature. To me the 
dream relates to a mood which is familiar to all of 
us as the years pass and as age comes nearer to us, 
a mood when we gaze tenderly, but a little wist- 
fully, at the grace and youth of a new generation. 
I am very content ; I sit happily with my books, and 
I watch with delight the young flying figures that 
are playing tennis on the lawn, or dancing, but the 
pleasure is accompanied sometimes with a little 
sigh of remembrance, for it was very good once 
upon a time to be young, and in my dream I am 
young again. 

The dream that is recorded on page 163, Chapter 
XIII, is used there as an illustration of the working 
of the two factors of our dual consciousness in a 
dream, and has its place in the argument of that 



98 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

chapter. It may be referred to here from another 
point of view. In this dream certain household 
possessions, some silk curtains and pieces of bro- 
cade had been found out of doors upon the ground, 
soiled by rain and melting snow. I was distressed 
by their condition and absorbed in the care of get- 
ting them dried and cleaned. I took part in the 
dream in a dual capacity — (1) as the "dreamer" 
who found the things in the snow and was busied 
in restoring them, and (2) as an outsider, a critic, 
who argued with the dreamer, questioning the real- 
ity of the worry that was so oppressive, and insist- 
ing that the trouble was only "dream trouble." 

It was suggested to me by one who has brought 
his great knowledge of psychology to the science of 
healing, to whom I had been allowed to send some 
of my dream notes, that I had not dwelt upon the 
symbolisms in dreams, or laid sufficient stress on 
this aspect of them. He wrote: "Your dream of 
the brocade and silk curtains strongly suggests to 
me a symbolism and reference to some mental ex- 
perience (repressed thoughts, etc.) of your inner 
life. I would not pretend to guess what these were, 
but will leave you to your own psycho-analysis, 
which might show what 'soiled' thoughts you may 
have had. I feel quite sure that symbolisms do 
occur, for I have observed in my subjects such obvi- 
ous ones that they needed no psycho-analysis. 
However, to hold that all dreams are symbolic, as 
Freud does, is to me absurd." 

My own analysis of the dream suggests to me a 



SYMBOLISM IN DREAMS 99 

different symbolism which, although a simple one, 
accounts, I think, for the mental disturbance that 
the dream represented. 

Some time previously the old country house in 
which I live had come to me by inheritance. I have 
always looked on myself as caretaker or guardian of 
it and of its contents. Difficulties arising from war- 
time conditions in giving adequate care to these, 
and the need for special precautions as to insur- 
ance, etc., were often in my mind. I am convinced 
that these anxieties were symbolised in the dreams, 
and that they are the explanation of the " dream 
trouble'' which obsessed me. 

Belief in a symbolic and prophetic significance 
attaching to dreams is revealed in some form or 
other in the religions and early literature of all 
races. Dreams filled a great place in the beliefs 
and traditions of primitive peoples: the strange- 
ness of the dream life, so like and yet so unlike the 
normal life of man, seems to have haunted his 
thoughts from the beginning of time. The Hebrew 
people were in no way singular in looking on dreams 
as allegorical in character and as the channel 
through which divinely inspired messages and warn- 
ings were conveyed to men, and in setting a high 
value on the gifts of those who seemed able to 
interpret their hidden meanings. Underlying these 
beliefs there was always the conviction that in sleep 
or in the transition time between sleeping and wak- 
ing the mind is especially sensitive to influences 



100 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

external to itself, and lends itself readily as a 
medium of communication with the unseen. 

From the dawn of history down to the present 
day these beliefs have appeared and reappeared, 
and would seem to be deeply rooted in the minds of 
men, since they have survived all changes in men's 
faiths. In a primitive form they linger on to this 
day. Fragments of the jold soothsayer's lore are 
still to be found in our villages, and the wise woman 
can tell you, if she will, what your dream of last 
night portends. In these interpretations the event 
foreshadowed is generally in sharp contrast to the 
thing dreamed of. " Dream of joy, and wake to 
sorrow," and "Dream of frost, and dread fire," are 
samples of a dream lore that has the weight of long 
tradition in our countryside. It cannot be only 
amongst primitive countryfolk that interest and 
belief in the significance of dreams are still to be 
found, for a book purporting to give the meanings 
of two thousand four hundred dreams lies before 
me. If its contents prove disappointing to the 
seeker after enlightenment, in quantity at least it 
leaves nothing to be desired; few of us, however 
active our dream life may be, could ask for more. 
The old conceptions about dreams and their pro- 
phetic significance are probably to be found nowa- 
days only among the uneducated; but for centuries 
the same beliefs were part of the general creed, ac- 
cepted alike by the simple and the learned; aW it 
was only in later times, when scientific knowledge 
had advanced and reasoning had become more criti- 



SYMBOLISM IN DREAMS 101 

cal, that the old unquestioning acceptance of such 
traditions gave way, and there sprang up among 
educated men a profound distrust of everything that 
savoured of superstitions from which they had 
but lately freed themselves. Their distrust was 
indeed so great that the dread of superstition be- 
came at times as unreasoning as the older dread 
of heresy. And so it came about that, because 
dreams had formerly been looked upon as a recog- 
nised part of the supernatural machinery of the 
world, any discussion of the phenomena of dream- 
ing was vetoed and their study condemned, lest 
superstition should again lift up its head or have 
any say with regard to them. But generations 
come and go, and with each generation the point of 
view alters. Now once more philosophers are occu- 
pied with the problem of the significance of dreams. 
The study of dreams is their especial province, and, 
whilst we pay all due honour to their difficult re- 
searches in the field of the unconscious, it is not too 
much to say that some of their subtle dream inter- 
pretations seem to ask for as great a measure of 
faith on the part of the unlearned as was ever de- 
manded by the interpreters of old. 



CHAPTER VIII 

DEEAM PLACES 

My dreams . . . are of architecture and of buildings — cities 
abroad, which I have never seen, and hardly hope to see. I have 
traversed, for the seeming length of a natural day, Rome, Am- 
sterdam, Paris, Lisbon — their churches, palaces, market places, 
shops, suburbs, ruins, with an inexpressible sense of delight — 
a map-like distinctness of trace — and a daylight vividness of 
vision that was all but being awake. — Charles Lamb. 

There are a few dreamers who are privileged to 
revisit often a dream country that becomes as 
familiar to them as any country that they know by 
day. In a little book called " Dreams in War- 
Time, " Mr. E. M. Martin has described in detail a 
countryside to which his dreams give him access. 
It is, he says, "a country I know well, and that is 
as real to me, and as dear to me, as any of the fields 
and woods I knew and loved when a child. In it 
there are dream woods, where I can lose my way as 
contentedly as in the New Forest, for dream squir- 
rels, ponies, deer, and dogs follow me in friendly 
fashion along untrodden paths ; dream houses where 
I am by turns host, by turns guest; dream castles 
(sometimes in ruins, but more often in all their old 
state and splendour), where every room is familiar 
to me ; dream rivers, along whose sleepy tide I have 
floated through lazy summer days; dream villages, 

in whose inn parlour I am a welcome guest. " 

102 



DREAM PLACES 103 

Few of us are quite as fortunate as Mr. Martin 
has been in the matter of dreams, for until the war 
intruded itself into his pleasant dream country and 
disturbed its peace, he seems to have had constant 
access to his favourite dream places; the dreams 
that he relates are coherent and vivid, and more- 
over he has learnt the art that must be acquired if 
dream notes are to be of value, the art of full and 
accurate recording. But even if we are not so lucky 
as to have the right of entry into a favourite coun- 
try every night at will, many of us have some place 
of dream into which from time to time we find our 
way; some dream house of which the key is ours. 
It is always with a certain glad surprise that we 
recognise rooms that have thus become familiar to 
us — passages every turn of which we know. 

The construction of these dream houses, and the 
geography of dream places, are good examples of 
the methods of the dream mind, and of its curious 
way of handling and altering the memories of whicl 
it makes use in the building of dreams. Memory 
seems by choice to go back for the materials of these 
dream scenes to a more or less distant past; our 
actual surroundings at the present moment, the 
rooms, the streets, the countryside in which we are 
living, do not occur nearly as often as do the rooms 
and scenes of past years. In these, as in all its 
operations, the dream mind seizes upon memories 
that had almost faded from waking consciousness, 
and vividly renews them. In much the same way a 
photograph of a house, faintly remembered, brings 



104 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

back a thousand details which had grown dim in 
our minds, so that, having looked at it, we almost 
forget how much we had forgotten. 

Of such dream memories of childhood de Quincey 
wrote : ' ' The minutest incidents of childhood or for- 
gotten scenes of later years were often revived. I 
could not be said to recollect them, for if I had been 
told of them when waking I should not have been 
able to acknowledge them as parts of my past ex- 
perience. But placed as they were before me, in 
dreams like intuitions, and clothed in all their 
evanescent circumstances and accompanying feel- 
ings, I recognised them instantaneously. ' ' x 

But the dream mind, though it depends upon the 
materials that memory supplies, hardly ever uses 
those materials without altering them. It would 
seem as though the dream imagination cannot rest 
satisfied simply with re-creating ; it must build anew, 
it must alter, it must add. It will, for instance, 
select for the dream scene one floor only of a familiar 
house, or make choice of one remembered room, and 
will work this into another building, all else being 
omitted or changed. Or again, one particular gar- 
den corner will be used, and the rest neglected by this 
capricious artist. Just as the dream mind alters 
the meaning of a sound or other sense impression 
that reaches the brain, and as it changes the char- 
acters of a book that we are reading, so it transforms 
our recollections of familiar places, and pieces differ- 

i De Quincey, "Confessions of an English Opium Eater." 



DREAM PLACES 105 

ent pictures together in curious and unexpected com- 
binations. 

There is a house that I know well in my dreams, 
in which passages and stairways innumerable lead 
from attic to attic on many levels. Their floors are 
old and uneven ; the walls are covered with a paper 
made long ago to resemble blocks of grey granite; 
I suppose it would be thought hideous nowadays, but 
in the dream house it seems to me wholly delightful, 
for it has the charm of memory, the restfulness of 
something very familiar. When I try to trace the 
geography of the dream house, I recognise the real 
attics and passages from which it took its origin. 
"With a thousand other memories the dream house 
has grown out of the old country home of my child- 
hood. The attics have changed places, rooms belong- 
ing to another house have got built into the dream 
house. In many ways it is altered, but things that 
matter remain unchanged. I know the very smell of 
the store-cupboard round the next corner, where the 
damson cheese and jellies in tiny leaf-shaped moulds 
are stored. I know that in the further attic the scent 
of jasmine will come in 'at the casement window, and 
the jasmine sprays will tap lightly against the panes 
just as they used to do ; and at the end of the passage 
wooden steps, worn unevenly into hollows, will lead 
down into a warm and friendly kitchen. The literal 
faithfulness of many of the details recalled in these 
dreams is as characteristic of the dream mind as the 
capriciousness with which it makes its selections 



106 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

amongst our memories, which must all, it seems, be 
transmuted by the alchemy of the imagination. 

De Quineey's dream of Easter is as perfect an 
illustration as could be found of such alterations 
made in a dream scene, and of the blending of mem- 
ories of places that are far apart into one dream 
picture. This beautiful dream, moreover, has little 
of the strangeness, and none of the horror, that char- 
acterised many of those that he recorded, and that 
made his nights so full of agitation and misery. 

"I thought it was a Sunday morning in May, that 
it was Easter Sunday, and as yet very early in the 
morning. I was standing, as it seemed to me, at 
the door of my own cottage. Right before me lay 
the very scene which could be commanded from that 
situation, but exalted, as was usual, and solemnised 
by the power of dreams. There were the same moun- 
tains, and the same lovely valley at their feet; but 
the mountains were raised to more than Alpine 
height, and there was interspace far larger between 
them of meadows and forest lawns. ... I gazed 
upon the well-known scene, and I said aloud (as I 
thought) to myself, 'It wants yet much of sunrise; 
and it is Easter Sunday; and that is the day on 
which they celebrate the first-fruits of resurrection. 
I will walk abroad ; old griefs shall be forgotten to- 
day; for the air is cool and still . . . with the dew 
I can wash the fever from my forehead, and then I 
shall be unhappy no longer. ' And I turned, as if to 
open my garden gate ; and immediately I saw upon 
the left a scene far different; but which the power of 



DREAM PLACES 107 

dreams had reconciled into harmony with the other. 
The scene was an Oriental one ; and there also it was 
Easter Sunday, and very early in the morning. 
And at a vast distance were visible, as a stain upon 
the horizon, the domes and cupolas of a great city — 
an image or faint abstraction, caught perhaps in 
childhood from some picture of Jerusalem. And 
now a bow-shot from me, upon a stone and shaded by 
Judean palms, there sat a woman; and I looked; 
and it was — Ann." 1 

In the little book that has already been quoted, 
Mr. Martin speaks of the sense of pleasure renewed 
with which he enters his dream country, and, like 
him, I find it difficult to describe how happy some of 
these dreams are. When I have waked from them 
and have begun to write them down, I have wondered 
why it should seem so hard to be torn away from 
them, when so little had happened, and why they 
should give such an odd unexplained sense of joy. 
Dreams, so uneventful that it seems hardly worth 
while to record them at all, will give us that delicious 
childish sense of happiness. It is childlike, and that 
is no doubt in great part the secret of our pleasure. 
In dreams the responsibility that rests upon us by 
day is taken from us. Only the things of the pres- 
ent moment matter; and in this respect we become 
like children. I am sure that we ' ' Olympians ' ' make 
far too much of the actual happiness of the state of 
childhood ; it is often infinitely happier to be " grown 
up"; but in this respect at least childhood is for- 

2 De Quincey, "Confessions." 



108 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

tunate, and we, in our good dreams, are fortunate 
too; the weight of responsible care is for a little 
while lifted from us. It is because when we leave the 
dream country we leave that happy state of irre- 
sponsibility behind us that we feel such a pang of 
regret when we have to turn aside and come back to a 
workaday world where we have once more to shoul- 
der our natural duties and cares. For a little while 
we had forgotten them and they were laid aside, 
but now again our lives belong not to ourselves but 
to others, and we often take up life again with a 
chill sense of disappointment. We come back, it is 
true, to a world that is just as lovely to look upon 
as the dream world that we have left, but we our- 
selves are different, and the spell is broken. In one 
of the most perfect of his essays, Elia tells his dream 
children of the great house in Norfolk, presided over 
by their great-grandmother Field, telling them "how 
I could never be tired with roaming about that huge 
mansion with its vast empty rooms, with their worn- 
out hangings, fluttering tapestry, and carved oaken 
panels, with the gilding almost rubbed out. ' r When 
we read afresh the tender wistful words with which 
Elia's story of his dream children closes, they bring 
back to us the same forlorn sense of disappointment 
that we also feel when we are called away from our 
happy dreams. We too aije rueful to leave a dream 
country where we would so gladly have lingered. 
Elia's beautiful dream house, with its stately walled 
gardens, was built up from the faithful memories 
of his childhood, just as are the dream houses to 



DREAM PLACES 109 

which we go back oftenest in our sleep. But there 
are other dreams in which we discover and explore 
buildings that are quite unlike these familiar places, 
and unlike anything that we have ever known by day. 
I am not thinking of the creations of fevered dreams, 
or of such monstrous inventions of drugged sleep 
as some of those described by de Quincey, but only 
of things that we may meet with in the course of 
ordinary dreams of healthy sleep. In some of these 
ordinary dreams imagination forsakes altogether the 
familiar lines of the architecture that we are accus- 
tomed to, and boldly creates for itself original build- 
ings that seem to the dreamer at least to be new and 
noble in design. A museum, vast and splendid, with 
reading-rooms and stately galleries, and a new na- 
tional picture gallery with great entrance doors, that 
open wide above broad curving nights of steps rising 
from a street thronged with traffic, have become fa- 
miliar places in my dreams. Their lofty corridors 
and great staircases and doorways seem to be con- 
structed as many dream buildings are, for us to fly 
in, rather than to walk in. They seem also to have a 
gayer atmosphere than that of our real museums, 
and as I have entered their doors I have said to my- 
self, "I remember this pleasant place — I know that 
here I shall be happy." 

All of us who know a particular dream country 
well, know the delight with which we recognise some 
especial characteristic landmark that has come to 
have associations of its own for us in this dream 
world. I do not know how far a great story-teller 



110 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

needs to experience the sensations that he writes of ; 
in the " Brushwood Boy," Mr. Kipling has described 
with the wonderful air of truth that he is master of, 
the emotion of pleasure that such recognition brings, 
and also the curious way in which certain elements 
of a dream will persist for years in our dreams 
until they may even become factors of importance in 
our waking as well as in our sleeping hours. No 
doubt others have had experiences similar to those 
of the boy who constantly "found himself sliding 
into dreamland by the same road — a road that ran 
along a beach near a pile of brushwood. To the 
right ran the sea, sometimes at full tide, sometimes 
withdrawn to the very horizon; but he knew it for 
the same sea. By that road he would travel over a 
swell of rising ground covered with short withered 
grass, into valleys of wonder and unreason." x The 
boy in this story was not singular in having a definite 
dream spot which came to be the "jumping-ofT" 
place for all his best dreams. Many dreamers find 
that they have some such starting-place, and indeed 
Mr. Kipling's story would not seem as convincing as 
it does if it were simply a fanciful creation, unrelated 
to real experiences shared by other dream adven- 
turers. 

Many years ago a friend gave me the following 
account of a recurrent place dream which seems to 
have affected not only her dream life but also her 
normal waking life. "You know," she wrote, "that 
I live in sight of a wide plain stretching away to very 

iRudyard Kipling, "A Day's Work." 



DREAM PLACES 111 

distant hills. The plain is always changing with 
changing lights and shadows. You can watch it best 
from certain high open places where the woods end 
and the uplands begin. A path through the woods 
comes out on to one of these open places. Standing 
there you look out over the wide distance of the plain, 
east and west and north. Long ago I found that this 
particular spot with this view of the plain came con- 
stantly into my dreams. They had a way of forming 
round it. The dreams varied very much, but I no- 
ticed that all those that I liked best — the dreams that 
led to fine adventures — began there. By degrees I 
came to feel that just as the happiest dreams started 
in that place, anything supremely good that might 
come into my life, and the greatest of its adventures, 
would surely begin there, too. 

"The place of dreams gradually became a curious 
sort of touchstone for the people who came about me 
and who cared for me. 'I shall not,' I said to my- 
self in the rashness of my confident youth, 'marry 
anyone who does not find his own way to the dream 
place, and understand its significance. ' I should not 
be writing this to you if my dream story had ended 
differently. When after months of separation . . . 
came, and led me straight to the dream place, with- 
out word or sign from me, I knew that my dreams 
had been true in their foreshadowing, and that they 
were now at last to be perfectly fulfilled. ' ' 

This account was given by my friend as an instance 
of what she regarded as a series of prophetic dreams. 
It may be so, but it seems to me rather an instance 



112 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

of the strong influence that a recurrent place dream 
may have even upon our waking mind. The effect of 
a dream which persists in this way, and which repeats 
itself as an echo does, becomes intensified by the fact 
of repetition. The series of dreams which extended 
over many months had evidently strongly affected 
my friend's waking and sleeping thoughts. 
Thought-reading of a simple kind such as was here 
involved would be no difficult matter to the insight 
of love ; love and comprehension went hand in hand 
in her lover's case, and I think that his intuitive 
perception of the trend of her thoughts led him with- 
out difficulty to her place of dreams. 



CHAPTER IX 

DREAM CONSTRUCTION 

magic sleep ! comfortable bird ! 

That broodest o'er the troubled sea of the mmd 

Till it is hush'd and smooth ! unconfined 

Restraint! imprisoned liberty! great Key 

To golden palaces, strange mintrelsy, 
Fountains grotesque, new trees, bespangled caves, 
Echoing grottoes, full of trembling waves 
And moonlight; ay, to all the mazy world 
Of silvery enchantment ! 

— Keats, Endymion. 

When we try to define the essential difference 
between our thoughts and our dreams, the greater 
incoherence of dreams will probably most often be 
suggested. I do not myself hold the belief that in- 
consecutiveness and incoherence are particularly 
characteristic of dreaming; certainly not that they 
are essential to it. They are often associated in our 
minds with the dream state, but chiefly because our 
memory of dreaming is so imperfect that links of 
thought which are necessary to make the memory of 
a dream coherent are often forgotten when we wake. 
It is these links of thought that make a rational con- 
nection between the successive stages of dream ideas, 
and that suggest various dream adventures that seem 
to be almost lunatic if these links in the chain are lost. 
A better system of dream memory would often 

113 



114 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

remedy this, and would show us how orderly and, in 
a way, how rational are the methods of dream con- 
struction. Even by day, if we allow our thoughts to 
wander for a time at will, and then try to retrace all 
the byways that they followed, there will probably 
be some steps that we cannot recall. This is still 
more likely to be true in the case of dream conscious- 
ness, but the habit of retracing the steps of thought 
can be acquired as well with regard to our dreams as 
with regard to the course of our wandering thoughts 
by day. 

I believe that in reality the essential difference 
between thinking and dreaming lies rather in the 
greater intensity with which imagination works in 
the dream state. A stray thought which comes into 
our mind by day is glanced at, is turned over, as it 
were, in our mind, and dismissed; and a hundred 
such thoughts may occur and be considered, without 
seriously deflecting the direction of the main current 
of our thought. But in a dream the process is 
different. "When an idea comes to the surface of 
dream consciousness, the imagination seizes upon it, 
and not only looks at it but proceeds to embody it 
into a solid fact ; it thus ceases to be simply an idea, 
and becomes a definite figure in three dimensions — a 
thing active and gifted with life. This power exer- 
cised by the dream imagination alters all the se- 
quence of dreams and makes their course essentially 
different from that followed by our thoughts by day. 
This characteristic of dreams is exemplified in the 
following notes on dream construction, and these 



DREAM CONSTRUCTION 115 

notes show also some of the links which connect 
together and explain the successive stages of a 
dream. It will be seen how without the memory of 
these links the dream falls to pieces and would ap- 
pear quite incoherent to the waking mind. 

"It was a winter's day, and I was looking at the 
gaily dressed windows of a shop in Oxford Street; 
its windows, filled with the little orange-trees and 
flowers of the Mayfair Flower Workers, attracted me 
and I stayed admiring them, jostled a little by the 
crowd of people who were continually passing by. 
The roadway also was thronged with motors and 
with motor omnibuses and — drawn up near the 
pavement where I stood I noticed more particularly 
— a small old-fashioned brougham that was painted 
dark blue, and that was drawn by a white horse. 
The next thing that I remember is that my attention 
was attracted upwards, and I remained for some 
time spell-bound, watching the curious, rather uncer- 
tain, flight of a dragon — a dragon with very short 
red wings, who was pulling an aerial car at some little 
height above the rest of the traffic and some way 
above the heads of the people in the crowded street. 
'The dragon isn't nearly strong enough for the car 
he has got to pull, ' I exclaimed ; 'his wings are absurd 
little things, not nearly big enough for the job — why, 
a good aeroplane would be better than that!' The 
dragon was certainly rather feeble, but it kept up its 
jerky flight bravely along Oxford Street, and finally 
turned down Regent Street, where I lost sight of it. ' ' 

Now, when I woke up later from this dream I could 



116 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

see no mental link at all between the ordinary sights 
of the London street that I had been watching and 
the dragon car. But as I looked back more carefully 
at the picture film of memory I recalled the white 
horse that I had noticed just before the coming of the 
dragon, and that white horse was the clue that I 
sought. To those who dwell in our countryside the 
link connecting the thought of a white horse with the 
thought of a dragon is not far to seek. The original 
u White Horse " of King Alfred, scrawled upon the 
steep bluff of the Down that overlooks the Vale to 
which the White Horse gives its name, is indeed not 
a horse but a dragon shape — a white dragon drawn 
just as a prehistoric man or child might have drawn 
it; and carved in the soft turf of the Down it has 
survived the centuries unchanged. Now it often hap- 
pens that in the old house under the Wiltshire Downs 
where this dream was dreamed, my eyes rest on cer- 
tain little red and blue dragons who sprawl in en- 
gaging puppy-like attitudes on the covers and sides 
of the old Chinese dishes on my mantelpiece. From 
these funny dragon puppies with their wide mouths, 
their innocent kitten-like claws and feeble beginnings 
of wings, my thoughts have wandered away to other 
fiercer dragon shapes and dragon stories, to dragon- 
helmed warriors who came in dragon-keeled ships to 
our shores, or to Alfred's great Dragon Horse on 
the Downs. 

The dragon of my dreams had the building wings 
of these baby dragons, absurdly inadequate for a 
beast of burden, but I have no doubt that from them 



DREAM CONSTRUCTION 117 

the dream sprang, and that without them and without 
the White Horse the dream would have been dreamed 
quite differently. The building up of many of our 
long and elaborate dreams comes from such complete 
visualisation as this of each successive idea as it 
occurs. 

Other steps in the process of dream construction 
are shown in the following note. The simplest type 
of dream is given here because it exemplifies better 
than one of more imaginative interest would do the 
actual building up of a dream. 

"We were walking in a country unknown to me. 
We had crossed some grasslands and came to a 
roughly made stile of wooden bars, over which I 
helped my mother to climb. The path which we fol- 
lowed led down the side of a grassy slope which 
formed the side of a shallow winding valley. On 
our left the valley disappeared round a corner be- 
hind low hills. To our right a small foreign-looking 
village lay at a distance, too far off for us to see it 
clearly. Looking down the valley that we were 
descending into, I saw that the path lay across it 
like a white ribbon and then turned off to the right 
towards the distant village. ' It looks just like a road 
marked out upon a map, ' I thought, ' or like a railway 
map. ' As I looked again I saw that there was run- 
ning down the length of the valley a railroad track 
which I had not seen before and which crossed the 
path that we were following. We came nearer, and I 
saw that no gates guarded the crossing of the roads. 
'WTiat a dangerous sort of level crossing, ' I thought, 



118 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

'like some of those unguarded railway lines in 
America that we read of. There would be no warn- 
ing whatever of a train coming from behind the 
hills except the sound of it. ' I listened, and then I 
began to hear, far away, the roar of a train ; it came 
round the hill and round a sudden sharp curve at the 
foot of the valley, rushing towards us very fast. I 
stood clear of the line and watched it come and go. 
'Will it stop at the village 1 ?' I wondered. As it 
thundered by, three carriages at the end of the train 
detached themselves from it and followed, but at a 
lessening pace. 'Slip carriages for the village, of 
course, ' I thought. ' What a fine thing it is to see the 
oncoming of a great train — it is like the description 
of a stampede of wild cattle on the Western Plains. 
These slip carriages are like the animals selected and 
cut off by the herdsmen from the main body.' 
Again the suggested thought realised itself at once. 
From far down the valley there came the sound of 
many hoofs beating the earth all together with a 
deep sound, and there came tearing up it a vast body 
of splendid wild cattle ; their heads lowered, tossing 
their horns. They came rushing up — they were not 
very close to me, but I could see them part a little, 
and a few young ones, who were trailing rather be- 
hind them, got separated and were left a short way 
behind the rest. 

"No sense of fear was in my mind and no great 
surprise, 'I suppose that in this country it is natural 
to see such great herds,' was my thought."' The 
dream after this followed on a tranquil course, and 



DREAM CONSTRUCTION 119 

nothing else occurred that needs to be recorded. 

It is given here because it illustrates the process 
that constantly takes place in the making of a dream. 

The winding path that we look down upon suggests 
the marking of roads and railroads on a map; the 
railroad idea having been thus suggested, the dream 
mind seizes on it and makes it objective, and the rail- 
way at once takes its place in the dream valley. 
Path and railroad cross each other, and the crossing 
suggests the next step in the story. A rapid se- 
quence of ideas flashes through the mind somewhat 
as follows: a level crossing — its possible dangers — 
stories of accidents in certain American states at 
level crossings — sound of the train the only warning. 
Just such a sequence of thoughts as might occur if 
we were glancing at such a scene by day. But no 
sooner has the thought of the warning noise of a 
train flashed into the dream mind than it seizes upon 
this particular idea, and converts it into an actual 
fact. In the dream we listen, and in a few seconds 
the sound is heard. Imagination and memory work 
together so well that a perfect realisation of the roar 
of a train, increasing in sound as the train comes 
from behind the hills is produced. The illusion is 
complete. 

The dream goes on. I watch the foreshortened 
train as it rushes towards me, and the rush suggests 
the image of a charge of wild cattle. This image 
links on to the idea of the Western States just now 
recalled to mind, and suggests a ranch, and the ranch- 
men skilfully separating the required number of ani- 



120 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

mals from the herd. The simile is worked out rather 
fancifully by the dream imagination, in obedience to 
which the slip carriages are detached from the train. 
Then the imagination visualises the actual herd. It 
sees them come from afar; it hears — or makes me 
hear — the very sound of their trampling feet. 

Now this elaborate process of dream building is 
very much like the process that is carried on in the 
mind by day when images pass quickly across it, 
and one association calls up another. Only at night 
the imagination is not fettered by the discipline 
which restrains our wandering thoughts from fol- 
lowing too eagerly in the random track of every 
chance thought and suggestion. The imagination in 
sleep, unchecked in this way, can devote itself to per- 
fecting each successive image that arises, giving life 
and reality to each of them in turn, metamorphosing 
them, and constantly adding new facts and fresh 
touches to the pictures which are its creation. 

This simple explanation of the method of construc- 
tion of one very ordinary type of dream will seem 
quite inadequate to those who believe that the origin 
and contents of dreams are to be explained only on 
the basis of Freudian psycho-analysis. The theory 
of dream building by the association of ideas which 
seems to account for the making of many of these 
dreams does not take into consideration the symbol- 
isms and hidden meanings that the psycho-analyst 
finds in all of them. I do not question that there 
may be dreams that may symbolise the repressed 
or unconscious wish of Freudian teaching ; others no 



DREAM CONSTRUCTION 121 

doubt have a symbolic character, and represent some 
thought or mood experienced by the dreamer. But 
beside these, there are numberless dreams which do 
not seem to belong to either of these categories ; the 
construction of some of these may be accounted for 
by the theory of associated ideas. No single theory 
seems capable of explaining every kind of dream, 
and when we try to reason about dreams we have to 
take refuge once more in the fact that they are not all 
alike, but are so manifold in their nature as are the 
thoughts and imaginations of men. 



CHAPTER X 

SENSE IMPRESSIONS IN' DREAMS 
A dream itself is but a shadow. — Hamlet, ii, 2. 

In the numerous scientific books written about 
dreams a classification has been generally adopted 
dividing them into presentative (or sensorial) 
dreams, originating in physical impressions made 
upon the dreamer, and representative (or psychic) 
dreams, which originate in his mental impressions 
and in the memories which float up from the reserves 
of the brain; but the distinction thus made seems 
to be only a partially true one, for dreams do not 
actually fall thus into two perfectly separate groups. 
It would probably be nearer the truth to say that 
whereas all our dreams are made up of mental im- 
pressions and woven out of memories, sensory im- 
pressions and vibrations, starting either from within 
the body or from outside it, serve often to evoke 
those memories and to call up the mental images that 
dreams are composed of. 

The dream consciousness tries to account for 
every sensory impression that it feels, and in order 
to do this it invents a coherent and plausible expla- 
nation which it proceeds' to weave into a dream 
story. It is always difficult to know to what extent 
the dream consciousness is stimulated in this way by 

122 



SENSE IMPRESSIONS IN DREAMS 123 

sensory impressions, because, apart from the nature 
and occurrences of the dream itself, it is generally 
impossible when we wake up to tell what sensa- 
tions or vibrations played a part in and influenced 
the dream consciousness while we slepl£whether, for 
instance, during our sleep a little noise occurred 
which may have suggested an incident in the dream, 
or whether some slight sense of bodily discomfort 
such as undue warmth or cold may have altered its 
current. In most cases we can only make a vague 
guess at the nature of these sense impressions, for 
the dream mind transforms the sound or other 
slightly disturbing sensation into something wholly 
different from the original physical cause. A piece 
of wood falls lightly on the hearth while we sleep; 
the dream consciousness does not recognise the sound 
for what it actually is, but may imagine it to be the 
crash of an avalanche or transform it into the sound 
of far-off guns ; a wasp buzzes against the window- 
pane and the dream consciousness turns it into the 
drone of an aeroplane, and will forthwith develop the 
dream round the incident that is thus suggested. 
Parables and symbols are the language and the 
means of expression of the dream consciousness, but 
we are often unable to recognise or to interpret the 
meaning of the fable that has thus been constructed. 
As Mr. Havelock Ellis has expressed it — whatever 
the physical cause may have been that has started 
the dream consciousness into activity — "the internal 
and external stimuli which act upon sleeping con- 
sciousness are not a part of that consciousness, nor 



124 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

in any real sense its source or its cause. The ray 
of sunlight that falls on the dreamer, the falling 
off of his bed-clothes, the indigestible supper he ate 
last night — these things can no more l account' for 
his dream than the postman's knock can account for 
the contents of the letter he delivers. Whatever the 
stimuli from the physical world that may knock at 
the door of dreaming consciousness, that conscious- 
ness is apart from them, and stimuli can only reach 
it by undergoing transformation. They must put 
off the character they wear as phenomena of the 
waking world, they must put on the character of 
phenomena of another world, the world of dreams.' 7 

The following is an example of a transformation 
of this kind : 

I had been thinking intently for a long time before 
I slept of the anxieties of a friend who was engaged 
in a difficult task of nursing. A sudden spell of cold 
brought on some slight rheumatic pain during the 
night, of which I had not been conscious before I 
went to sleep. The pain came into my dream but was 
transferred to my friend. In it she became the 
patient — I was helping to nurse her, and my mind 
was concentrated on the problems and practical diffi- 
culties that she and I had lately discussed; the pain, 
which was really my own, being one of the symptoms 
of the illness that she was suffering from in the 
dream. 

This sensation was clearly one of the elements that 
entered into the construction of this dream, but it 
was only one element, for the thoughts that had filled 



SENSE IMPRESSIONS IN DREAMS 125 

my mind during the day and had preoccupied me 
before I slept gave the dream its shape and suggested 
practically all its incidents. Both sensation and 
memory alike underwent a dream change — they were 
transformed — and assumed, as Mr. Ellis has ex- 
plained, the character of phenomena of the world of 
dreams : 

It is certain that many dreams are thus stimulated 
by sensory impressions, often probably very slight 
ones which are never wholly extinguished during 
sleep ; and if we could retrace our dreams more per- 
fectly we should frequently find that incidents com- 
posing them originated in such a way as has been 
described. But dreams are of infinite variety, and I 
am convinced that there are also many that owe their 
existence to the action of memory alone, and that 
they are carried through by the dream mind without 
there having necessarily been any external stimulus 
or sense impression to account for them. 

Amongst dreams that we find most often quoted 
as being initiated by physical causes are our dreams 
of flight. We are told by most writers on dreams 
that these are certainly due to sense impressions, and 
it is generally assumed that the sense of flying or 
floating is caused by the fact that in sleep our feet 
are not resting on the ground, that they miss the 
accustomed sense of the earth's resistance, and that 
the subconscious mind in the exercise of its reason- 
ing faculty comes to the conclusion that this un- 
familiar absence of pressure signifies a condition in 
which the body must be floating in mid-air. This 



126 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

may be the true cause of many flying dreams, but as 
far as I can judge from the series of experiments 
which I have made, it is not a satisfactory explana- 
tion of my own dreams of flying. This particular 
type of dream was chosen as one to be watched and 
recorded, and from these experiments it seems to 
me that sense impressions do not influence these 
dreams nearly as certainly and powerfully as mental 
impressions influence them. I have already de- 
scribed how, by concentrating the mind upon the 
subject, these dreams can be made to recur, and how 
the accomplishment of definite acts of flight and new 
methods of flying can be acquired by the exercise of 
will-power. 

On the other hand, I have made very many at- 
tempts to see whether some particular bodily attitude 
during sleep would have any effect upon dream fly- 
ing. My notes show that lying on my back, lying 
upon either side, or as I often lie face downwards 
with my head pillowed on one arm, the sleeping atti- 
tude apparently makes no difference whatever to the 
flying dream. I made other experiments to see 
whether a pillow wedged at the foot of the bed, so 
that the feet were firmly pressed against it, would 
make any difference, but it did not apparently do so. 
The hands, moreover, are constantly used in these 
dreams, a slight waving or paddling motion giving 
direction or velocity to the flight; but I find that I 
fly just as well if either or both my hands are im- 
prisoned under the body, and even the fact of waking 
up with one hand ' ' gone to sleep ' ' by reason of con- 



SENSE IMPRESSIONS IN DREAMS 127 

tinned pressure on it has not apparently affected the 
dream. 

The conclusion that I gather from these experi- 
ments is that, whilst by an act of will it is possible to 
recapture the flying dream, and whilst the memory of 
past acts of flight helps to make such dreams recur, I 
can find little confirmation of the theory that these 
particular dreams are caused by physical sensations. 
The question of dream control has, however, been 
fully discussed and only belongs very indirectly to 
the question now under consideration of the part 
that sensory impressions play in the causation of 
our dreams. 

Having read of experiments being made to test 
whether dreams are directly affected by the senses 
of smell and taste, I tried certain of these experi- 
ments, and for this purpose kept on my pillow at 
night a few lavender flowers or rose-leaves, or a tiny 
grain of camphor or spice; but whilst the presence 
of one of these scented things leaves my dreams un- 
touched, it will produce a most vivid impression in 
the moments between sleeping and waking. This 
intensification of the senses when sleep is approach- 
ing has probably often been observed. The subject 
belongs more properly to a later chapter. Here I 
need only say that whilst at these times the senses 
of smell and taste become abnormally acute, these 
sense impressions do not " carry on" into the dreams 
that follow, and do not apparently influence them in 
any way. Incidents often occur in dreams in which 
I enjoy something that has a delicious flavour, but 



128 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

these incidents seem always to spring from memories 
of taste, and can be traced back to such memories, but 
not to any actual or present sensation ; for even when 
a morsel of spice has been kept in the mouth during 
sleep it has not succeeded in affecting the dream. 

The sense of warmth and cold seems to affect 
dreaming more than any other direct sense impres- 
sion, and both the nature of dreams and the power of 
remembering and recording them are influenced by 
the degrees of bodily warmth during sleep. 

It is a fact for which there is probably some quite 
simple physical explanation, that in order to be able 
to recall long dreams easily and accurately the body 
must be kept fairly and evenly warm ; and as I per- 
sonally like to sleep under only very light coverings, 
I have learned that I must add to these if the best 
dreams are to be dreamed or recorded. Delightful 
dreams are more apt to recur, and are more apt to 
be vivid in character, if the body is kept fairly warm 
during sleep. On the other hand, many people bear 
testimony to the fact that sleeping under an eider- 
down quilt or any coverings that produce undue 
warmth "give bad dreams" to the sleeper. I do not 
know of any other purely physical means by which 
the nature of dreams can be thus easily altered, but 
by variations in bodily temperature I have found 
that they can be modified, and the recording of long 
and complicated dreams is made easier to me if that 
temperature is rather carefully regulated. 

From whatever side we approach the subject of 
dreams there seems to be endless variety in indi- 



SENSE IMPRESSIONS IN DREAMS 129 

vidual experience concerning them, and on no point 
do dreamers seem to differ more widely than as to 
the memory that they retain in dreams of sense im- 
pressions. 

To those who have a very complete and fnll dream 
life, and for whom these experiences make up no 
inconsiderable part of the pleasure of living, all sense 
impressions will naturally take their due place during 
sleep. The memory of colour, light, and sound, of 
fine taste and delicate scent, and all the delight that 
our keenest sense impressions give us, should natu- 
rally be found repeating themselves in dreams; but 
in this respect, as in so many others, there is a sur- 
prising diversity in people's experiences. It is in- 
teresting to note the answers that we get if we put 
such questions to our friends as : "Do you see colour 
in your dreams? Is your dream world of varied 
colour like our own, or is it neutral tinted V* Al- 
though, I suppose, we all spend a considerable pro- 
portion of our life in dreaming, it is curious to find 
how many people, when they are asked such a ques- 
tion, cannot answer it, or recall with clearness any- 
thing about these aspects of their dream life. Some 
people, however, have told me at once that either 
they see no colour at all in dreams or that colour has 
made so little impression on them that they have no 
recollection of it. A few have said that their dream 
world is definitely colourless like a monochrome 
drawing, and that there seems to be very little bright 
sunlight or deep shadow in it. Others, again, say, 
and say most convincingly, that they see everything 



130 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

with the colours, lights, and shadows that we see in 
the world of day ; but perhaps the commonest experi- 
ence is to be able to recall very clearly some one 
passage or note of colour in a dream, whilst all recol- 
lection of colour in the rest of it has passed away. 
In nearly all my own dreams I find this to be the case ; 
the one colour note that is recalled is generally 
vividly retained, but the other objects of the dream 
are not remembered in colour at all, colour not being 
the fact about them that has arrested the attention 
enough to be remembered. 

When in after years I read in Robert Louis Stev- 
enson's "Chapter on Dreams" that as a child he had 
been "haunted by nothing more definite than a cer- 
tain hue of brown," which he did not mind in the 
least when he was awake, but feared and loathed 
while he was dreaming, it recalled vividly a dream 
which used from time to time to haunt my own child- 
hood. At a spot in Kensington Gardens which is 
now dominated by Watts' statue of "Physical 
Energy," the dream used to begin. The slow tick- 
ing of a watch gave warning, but alas ! too late, of 
what was inevitably approaching. In the eastern 
sky a cloud would come slowly sailing up till it 
reached and covered the zenith, a cloud of a shade of 
purplish brown which for some unknown reason was 
dreadful to me, and lastly, from somewhere very far 
away there would come the sound of the roll of 
drums. I thought life could hold nothing more full 
of fear than that colour accompanied by that distant 
sound, and no daylight reasoning gave me reassur- 



SENSE IMPRESSIONS IN DREAMS 131 

ance, until by a happy chance I learned how to make 
my escape from all such haunting dreams. 

A statement that appeared some years ago in a 
medical journal to the effect that colour vision in 
dreams is more often than not either imperfect or 
altogether absent, suggested this point to me as one 
that might well be noticed and recorded. I showed 
my notes to my father and asked him about his own 
memory of colour. 

He said that colour was always a prominent thing 
in his dreams. He instanced one favourite dream 
that from an early age had recurred from time to 
time during his long life. In it he would find himself 
on the top of the stage-coach, on which as a little boy 
he used to travel part of the lengthy journey between 
his school and his home, but the dream journey took 
him through country unknown to him, and of singu- 
lar beauty. He described the gradual descent of the 
coach into a wide and fair valley ; the colour of the 
trees on either side and the exquisite blue of the far 
distance that could be seen beyond the furthest limits 
of the valley were the elements in the dream scene 
that had made the greatest impression on his mem- 
ory. The subject having been thus suggested, he 
told me of other dreams in which colour vision was 
a prominent feature. Colour sense was evidently 
strong in them, and often seemed to be the point that 
most impressed his memory. The blossoming and 
vivid colour of his favourite crimson hawthorn-tree 
in a dream was reported to me one May morning 
during the last week of his life. My mother's dreams 



132 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

also seem to centre round colour, and colour seems 
to be the fact in them that she remembers most 
clearly. 

"In a gentian dream last night/' she records, "I 
found a lovely clump of Gentiana verna growing on 
low rocks together with a mossy-looking plant whose 
yellower green was in strong contrast with the colour 
of the leaves of the gentian — the starry flowers were, 
of course, of the deep gentian blue. ' ' 

Just as some people describe their dream world as 
being a colourless one, others say that they have no 
sense of smell in their dreams. 1 Possibly it is their 
memory of these sense impressions that is at fault, 
for I find in my own notes many observations of 
smell as well as of taste, observations not only of 
fragrant flower scents, but also of subtler impres- 
sions of smell such as that which occurs in the fol- 
lowing dream: "I was motoring through a country- 
side of steep hills and valleys ; dusk was beginning to 
fall ; ' lighting-up time ' had not actually come, but I 
was warned by the faint scent, cold, clean and un- 
mistakable, that belongs to valley mist, that, be- 
sides the natural darkening of the evening, a light 
mist was beginning to rise and to obscure the 
road." 

The sense of taste comes also into certain dreams, 
but all these impressions are quickly forgotten when 
we wake. I have looked at the wares of many a 

i "Very infrequently do we dream words, and almost never do we 
dream smells or tastes." — Lay, "Man's Unconscious Conflict," p. 167. 



SENSE IMPRESSIONS IN DREAMS 133 

confectioner, in the hope, never, I fear, to be realised 
in a waking world, that I might find amongst them 
the candy of a certain dream, candy of an entrancing 
green colour, and of a flavour that only a dream 
confectioner seems able to supply. 



CHAPTER XI 



BORDERLAND STATE 



Some say that gleams of a remoter world visit the soul in 
sleep. 

— Shelley, Mont Blanc. 

11 There is reason to suppose that our normal con- 
sciousness represents no more than a slice of our 
whole being. We all know that there exist subcon- 
scious and mzconscious operations of many kinds; 
both organic, as secretion, circulation, etc., which are 
in a sense below the operations to which our minds 
attend ; and also our mental, as the recall of names, 
the development of ideas, etc., which are on much 
the same level as the operations to which our minds 
attend, but which for various reasons remain in the 
background of our mental prospects. Well, besides 
these subconscious and unconscious operations, I be- 
lieve that super-conscious operations are also going 
on within us ; operations, that is to say, which tran- 
scend the limitations of ordinary faculties of cogni- 
tion, and which yet remain — not below the threshold 
— but rather above the upper horizon of conscious- 
ness, and illumine our normal experience only in 
transient and cloudy gleams. ' ' x 

No roads of enquiry offer greater inducements to 

i F. Myers, A Note in "Phantasms of the Living," vol. ii, p. 285. 

134 



BORDERLAND STATE 135 

the explorer of dream problems than those leading 
to the study of the transition stage which lies between 
sleeping and waking. I have travelled only a short 
way along these roads, and have been able to do 
little more than observe their beginnings and their 
direction. 

Widely varying stages of consciousness are in- 
cluded within this borderland state. It embraces 
experiences which stand in so close a relationship to 
our dreams that no clearly defined boundary can be 
drawn between them ; and on the other hand we meet 
from time to time within its borders with experiences 
far removed from dreams, apparently unrelated to 
our dream life, and which have a very special charac- 
ter of their own. 

The process of going to sleep may conveniently be 
divided into two stages, although no clearly marked 
division does in fact separate them. The earlier 
stage, further removed from sleep, is the state of 
quiet, when the body being soothed and tranquillised, 
restlessness ceases, when impressions from without 
need disturb us little, when thought can still be con- 
centrated and directed inwards, and our attention is 
still under our control. The later stage is the state 
of semi-consciousness that shades off imperceptibly 
into sleep, when concentration begins to lessen, atten- 
tion wanders, and we cease to direct the mind 's flight, 
until finally borderland consciousness gives place to 
dream consciousness. 

I propose to deal first with the earlier stage, the 
state of tranquillity. At the beginning of this book 



136 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

the question was asked, "Does any faculty of the 
mind change its character and assume functions dif- 
ferent from those which it possesses normally?" I 
believe that such a change does take place in both 
stages of the borderland state. In the earlier state 
of tranquillity certain mental faculties appear to 
operate with heightened powers ; and, as will be seen 
later, in the stage verging on sleep the same phe- 
nomenon may be observed in the case of certain 
faculties of sense. 

In that earlier state of quiet, when the activity of 
the body is stilled, we are able with the help of dark- 
ness to exclude irrelevant visual impressions, and to 
arrive at a certain measure of freedom from extrane- 
ous thoughts. In this condition we may suddenly 
find that the mind is working in a manner different 
from that which is normally characteristic of it. At 
such moments the answer to some difficult question, 
which has intrigued us and baffled our intelligence 
by day, may flash into the mind, appearing to come 
to us from without rather than from within. The 
missing links of thought that were needed have been 
supplied, we know not how; we are only aware that 
whereas something was previously lacking, the chain 
of thought is now entire, and the deduction drawn 
from it is complete. The process is similar to that 
which takes place in the * ' super-dream, ' ' but occurs 
on the hither side of the boundary of sleep instead of 
beyond it. In either case there is the same sense of 
surprise, when the answer comes, provided appar- 
ently by an agent or by a mental faculty which does 



BORDERLAND STATE 137 

not seem to work in the same way, or with the same 
limitations of power as our normal mind. 

The following note is given as an illustration of 
such a borderland experience which closely resembles 
the working of a "super-dream": One of the prob- 
lems about dreams that this book is concerned with 
had been occupying my thoughts for some time. I 
had found it very puzzling, and I made no progress 
with the chapter that I was attempting to write. 
One night I had passed into the stage of borderland 
quiet, and should presently have travelled on to the 
state of sleep ; my passage to the dream world was, 
however, interrupted by the intrusion of a recurrent 
word or thought. "Without any effort of will on my 
part the thought proceeded to shape itself. I can 
only describe my relation to this process as being 
that of a spectator watching it. From being first a 
word, and then a nebulous idea, it became more and 
more distinct until shortly after the argument seemed 
to be completed, but externally, so to speak, to my- 
self. In order to get rid of the too insistent chain 
of reasoning, and to avoid the effort of remembering 
it, I took pencil and paper which lay near at hand 
and wrote it down. Once written, it was pushed into 
the drawer by my bedside, and I slept. During the 
following days and weeks I was wholly absorbed in 
other work and in the anxieties brought about by the 
war, and this record lay in the drawer completely 
forgotten. So easy is it to lose all recollection of 
experiences that occur near the border-line of sleep, 
that when, some three or four weeks later, I came 



138 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

upon the written sheets, and had deciphered the 
scribbled semi- shorthand writing, I was bewildered 
as to their origin. At first I thought that I had at 
some time copied them from a book, but they were 
evidently intended as an integral part of my own 
book and argument, and then the forgotten border- 
land experience came back to me and I remembered 
it all clearly. The argument which came to me in 
this way required no alterations ; I agreed with its 
reasoning, but it still seems to me to be not quite 
"mine," and to be the expression of a mind more 
logical than my own. 

This stage of the borderland state is peculiar not 
only by reason of this heightening of the mental 
faculties, but also because it is the condition in which 
certain abnormal experiences are met with, which 
are among the most curious and significant of which 
the human mind is capable. The following note re- 
lates to such an abnormal experience which occurred 
to me while in this condition. It happened only once 
in my life ; it seemed so different in nature from any- 
thing else that I had known and has remained so 
entirely outside all my ordinary experience that, 
although I now know that a similar thing has hap- 
pened to others, I shall have found it difficult to be- 
lieve in it, if it had not happened to myself. 

I awoke before six o'clock one morning in my 
London bedroom and lay quietly thinking in a mood 
of great stillness. Quite suddenly my spirit seemed 
to leave my body — at least it is only in such words as 
these that I can describe what happened. I found 



BORDERLAND STATE 139 

myself outside my body — looking downwards from a 
little height above the foot of the bed at my own 

form lying there just below me. I saw , I saw 

my bed and the pale wall behind it, and the light 
window — I saw myself — but it was I, my own self, 
who looked on, who thought, and who in an instant 
was conscious of intolerable loneliness and of a great 
sense of desolation. 

I wanted — how intensely I wanted — to come back 
to the warmth and shelter of human love! I felt 
that I could not bear the separation from everything 
I understood and loved — and I crept back shuddering 
into my bodily existence. I know that I was crying 
bitterly when I came back, and that it needed all 

the comfort that could give me to make me 

feel safe again ; because for a time I felt so insecurely 
anchored to life and to my body. By degrees the 
feeling of distress went away, and I was comforted 
when I realised how completely I had still been my 
own self whilst this happened; how unchanged my 
identity was during those moments when I was 
freed from my body and looked at it from the out- 
side. 

Such riddles of the mind as these are very puzzling 
when we meet them thus as isolated individual ex- 
periences; they fall into their proper place in such 
books as " Phantasms of the Living," where they are 
duly related to other similar phenomena of dream 
and border consciousness. 

"The submerged life of the mind, however mys- 
terious and elusive, yet persistently attracts the 



140 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

naturalist of the mental world. " x The mystery and 
elusiveness of the mental phenomena which belong 
especially to the border state have always made a 
strong appeal to thinkers like Mr. Myers and those 
who have followed along similar paths of enquiry. 
They have not been afraid to acknowledge that many 
of these phenomena lie beyond man's present knowl- 
edge, and still elude his understanding. There is a 
readiness now to approach in a spirit of enquiry 
questions which would not formerly have been ad- 
mitted as matters for serious study and discussion. 
Amongst such questions none has perhaps attracted 
more attention and exacted more controversy than 
that of the possible existence of a human faculty, 
hitherto unrecognised by science, by means of which 
communications may take place between mind and 
mind through channels other than those of the senses. 
This question of telepathic communication is being 
systematically examined from different points of 
view by many of the most serious thinkers of the 
present day, and all available evidence for and 
against the existence of such a faculty is being con- 
sidered and weighed. Some among them, for in- 
stance Professor Lodge, men whose names are known 
and honoured throughout the world of science, go 
further, and affirm with unquestionable sincerity 
their assurance that such communications are not 
only transmitted from living mind to living mind, 
but are also transmitted by those who have crossed 
the threshold of death. 

i Jastrow, "The Unconscious." 



BORDERLAND STATE 141 

The implications of this belief are so great, involv- 
ing as this faith does the vital question of man's 
survival of bodily death, that whilst it excites in 
many minds the most intense interest, it seems with 
equal force to repel others. The discussion of ques- 
tions of such vast magnitude, which are the field of 
such acute controversy, is beyond the scope of 
this book; but these questions cannot be ignored 
when writing about the borderland state, for there 
is an intimate connection between them which must 
be taken into account when the nature of the mental 
faculties and the manner of their operation in this 
state are considered. All that can fittingly be urged 
is that, whatever view be taken, our judgment should 
not be formed without a study of the evidence that is 
available. This evidence is no longer left to mere 
hearsay ; much has been collected and sifted by men 
of distinction in science, letters, and philosophy. 
Some of the evidence collected has been already pub- 
lished in the journals and Proceedings of the Society 
for Psychical Research, and have been dealt with in 
the writings of Sir Oliver Lodge, Mr. Myers, Mr. 
Gurney, and others. Much still remains to be pub- 
lished which will eventually be available. Evidence 
that has been tested in the " spirit of critical exam- 
ination and enquiry" that these men have brought 
to bear on it cannot be lightly dismissed, even by 
those whose natural inclinations would lead them to 
reject any such investigation ; it deserves at the least 
respectful and attentive study. But however scien- 
tifically such evidence as this has been weighed, 



142 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

however judicially tested, it is quite possible that it 
may never wholly satisfy men 's natural longing for 
positive and easy certainties of proof. It will always 
be impossible to prove with the simple conclusive- 
ness of a problem in geometry that certain of the 
mental experiences of which some of us may feel 
most sure, but which are outside the common run of 
men's experience, are indeed facts and not illusion. 
From the very nature of these phenomena, no easy 
proof is possible, and the evidence concerning them 
cannot be grasped at all " without a mind sufficiently 
open to permit the beginning of an unusual course of 
study. " x It will therefore never bring conviction to 
the large class of persons who have resolved that 
things that lie beyond their own experience, and 
outside the ordinary experience of men, are impos- 
sible and not to be believed. There are very many 
such persons, and for them these problems will re- 
main questions that they consider it idle to discuss, 
and lying outside the province of possible or profit- 
able knowledge. We may, however, remind our- 
selves that the boundaries which men have from time 
to time laid down as limits of human knowledge 
which mankind would do well not to try to overstep 
have varied with every successive age. To-day men 
are pushing forward along new roads and are open- 
ing up new regions of thought and experience of 
which the last century had little conception, and the 
limits of which we cannot see. But even though this 
is the case, and though the new regions of enquiry 

i Sir Oliver Lodge, letter to The Times. 



BORDERLAND STATE 143 

be recognised as lawful fields for scientific investiga- 
tion, there are still great difficulties in the way of 
obtaining the evidence that is required with regard 
to many experiences of the human mind. This is 
especially true of evidence of the transmission of 
messages from mind to mind when such communica- 
tions are believed to come not from the living but 
from the dead. It is clear that much evidence will 
be required before this belief meets with general ac- 
ceptance ; at the same time, this evidence is especially 
difficult to obtain because these experiences are neces- 
sarily so intimate that they are seldom spoken of, 
but are treasured in the heart as things too near and 
too dear to be generally communicated. Their very 
nature often precludes their discussion, although 
they may be as convincing to the recipient of them as 
any other of the deepest experiences of the human 
spirit. If this were not the case, it would, I think, 
be found that these experiences are less rare than 
men have supposed. The dread of giving way to 
superstition or of being thought superstitious, the 
fear of possible self-deception, combined with our 
natural reluctance to speak of things that are so 
closely interwoven with our most intimate joys and 
sorrows, prevent our imparting to or learning from 
each other much that would be of the deepest interest 
and value. 

Few of us have either the faith or the moral cour- 
age that made it possible to give to the world such a 
book as " Raymond"; for most of us the barriers in 
the way of such sincere revelation are too great, and 



144 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

hence our records will perhaps always be incomplete 
and scantier than they need otherwise be, but per- 
haps even this difficulty will not for ever stand in the 
way, when we realise more fully the need of this 
knowledge, and the necessity of testing and sifting 
the evidence that bears on it. Whatever our beliefs 
may be, whether we stand, as I certainly do, among 
those to whom the survival of human personality 
after bodily death, and the power of communication 
with those who have so survived, are realities and 
facts of experience, or whether we are in the large 
majority, for whom this faith in the possibility of 
communication between the living and the dead is at 
the utmost a matter of very doubtful conjecture, we 
may all agree that it is a question that transcends 
our understanding, and that in any case we stand 
only upon the threshold of such knowledge. 

There are, however, other open points which, 
though they may also be disputable matters, excite 
less passionate and heated controversy. Amongst 
these are certain questions relating to possible tele- 
pathic communication between the living. If for the 
purposes of enquiry we may provisionally accept the 
hypothesis that under certain circumstances com- 
munications may take place between mind and mind 
through apparently immaterial channels, our enquiry 
might take the form of trying to ascertain whether 
either in the dream state or the borderland state the 
mind is specially sensitive to such impressions. 

We cannot draw a hard and fast line between cer- 
tain stages of borderland consciousness and the 



BORDERLAND STATE 145 

lightest stages of dreaming sleep, for the two states 
pass imperceptibly the one into the other. On the 
upper levels of sleep, when the dreamer is nearest 
to being awake, sense impressions from without have 
power more or less to affect his consciousness, and 
may alter the current of his dream. It may conceiv- 
ably be the case that, in some such way as the senses 
of the dreamer are affected by sound or by light, a 
current of thought may influence a mind sensitive to 
such impressions. I have never found that in the 
actual dream state my own mind is specially gifted 
with this sensitiveness. The material and fashion- 
ing of dreams seem rather to come from within and 
to be the creation of my own mind; and although 
imagination working under dream conditions is mar- 
vellously quickened and heightened, it is generally 
occupied with the remembered facts of normal ex- 
perience, facts which it alters and glorifies beyond 
recognition, but the materials of which are neverthe- 
less supplied by memory. In other words, the 
greater number of dreams would seem to me to be 
evolved from without. On such points we each speak 
from our personal experience, and I can only say that 
in my own case my mind is not sensitive in this way 
in sleep. 1 In the course of all its dreaming activities 
it has never received with any conviction of certainty 

i "Dreams form only a very subsidiary part of the evidence" 
(for telepathic communication) ; ". . . they do not prove telep- 
athy; rather they are themselves shown to be telepathic by the 
analogies of the more cogent evidence drawn from waking hours 
. . . but they are instructive . . . they initiate us into the methods 
of subconscious processes." — Myers, "Phantasms of the Living." 



146 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

the impression of messages or thoughts transmitted 
by another mind. Such messages I have received 
from time to time; but they have never come in 
dreams but always in the condition of partially sus- 
pended mental activity and complete bodily tran- 
quillity attained in the quiet mood when we wait for 
sleep or have just emerged from it, when the normal 
activities of sensory perception are more or less in 
abeyance. Mr. Jastrow describes this state as ' ' that 
state upon the verge of sleep in which the mind 
seems peculiarly open to suggestion ' ' ; and both my 
own and many other people's observations would 
seem to confirm the fact of this special receptiveness 
of the mind to suggestion and communication in the 
borderland state. 

It is only in this state that I am personally familiar 
with the condition of tranquillity in which the mental 
faculties are thus heightened and sensitised; but I 
know that it is a state that is reached by others in 
other ways and at other times. Some are able to 
enter it when they choose by a definite act of will, by 
great concentration of mind, and by refusing to allow 
casual impressions to divert their attention. It is in 
such a condition that the inspiration of poets and 
thinkers, the spiritual vision of saints and mystics, 
has come to them. Their new conceptions, their 
clearest vision of spiritual things, have been realised 
in such moods. And it is in such moments, when the 
surface of the mind is unruffled like that of a dark 
still pool, that the artist finds himself able to appre- 



BORDERLAND STATE 147 

hend a part of that essential truth that he is always 
seeking to express in his work. 

The state in which at times the artist's mind works 
is, in fact, analogous in many respects to the mental 
condition reached in the borderland state. The fol- 
lowing note that a painter sends me describing his 
own method of work, when the design of a picture 
is being thought out, is therefore not without interest 
in this place: 

"At the crucial moment in the planning of a pic- 
ture the design has to be fused into a unity; it is 
often necessary to shut oneself up alone, reduce the 
light, and bring the mind into a state of perfect still- 
ness. The reduction of the light is of importance; 
not merely because the details of the design are thus 
subordinated, but because in darkness the mind is 
less disturbed by external stimuli, and becomes more 
receptive to the internal stimuli. It becomes easier 
to ignore the ascertained facts of a particular picture 
and to draw directly upon the imaginative memory 
which I suppose supplies one's dreams." 

A somewhat similar state is described .in the note- 
books of Leonardo; and Kakki, the great Chinese 
painter of the eleventh century, gives a full descrip- 
tion of the method by which he attained to this con- 
dition, which he found to be essential for his art. 

"Ku K'ai-chih of Tsin builded a high-storied 
pavilion for his studio, that his thought might be 
more free. . . . Unless I dwell in a quiet house, seat 
myself in a retired room with the windows open, 



148 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

table dusted, incense burning, and the ten thousand 
trivial thoughts crushed out and sunk, I cannot have 
good feeling for painting or beautiful taste, and 
cannot create the 'yu' (the mysterious and wonder- 
ful)." 1 

The borderland state that we have been consider- 
ing happens to present a certain analogy not only to 
the condition of mind in which the artist works, but 
also to the condition reached in hypnosis. 

"When sleep is approaching, the flow of our 
thoughts is gradually diminished and the activity of 
the brain subsides ; certain ideas and the neural sys- 
tems corresponding to those ideas are still active. 
. . . There is still kept a certain channel of entry to 
the brain; and the impressions that are introduced 
at such a time tend to operate with abnormally great 
effect because they work in a free field, unchecked by 
rival ideas and tendencies." 2 

This brief extract from Mr. McDowell's account of 
hypnotic sleep and the approach to it describes a 
condition which obviously bears a strong resem- 
blance to the approach of normal sleep; and Mr. 
McDowell's explanation of the manner in which cer- 
tain impressions are enhanced suggests a possible 
explanation of the manner in which mental faculties 
are heightened in the transition state which we have 
described in this chapter. 

This analogy is clearly one on which it would be 

i Translation of an essay by Kakki. Fenellosa, "Epochs of Chi- 
nese and Japanese Art." 

2 W. McDowell, Encyclopaedia Britarmica, "Hypnotism." 



BORDERLAND STATE 149 

dangerous for the amateur student, unequipped with 
the necessary scientific knowledge, to lay too much 
stress. Moreover, whilst the observations in this 
book are based upon personal experience, I have no 
such personal experience of the hypnotic state ; any 
attempt to apply the suggested analogy would there- 
fore almost certainly lead me into error. 



CHAPTER XII 



BOKDEELAND STATE 



If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would 
appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, 
till he sees all things through the narrow chinks of his cavern. — 
William Blake. 

The earlier stage of the borderland state has now 
been considered as far as my slender experience and 
knowledge enable me to discuss it, and we must now 
pass on to the later stage, that which is nearest to 
the verge of sleep. In the earlier stage the height- 
ening of the mental faculties has been noted. I have 
made many notes on the similar phenomena which 
occur in the later stage of borderland consciousness ; 
the curious heightening of sense impressions that 
take place when sleep is approaching. When we 
are nearest to sleep the senses become abnormally 
acute. A sudden apparent increase of the bright- 
ness of the light of a candle or lamp at these mo- 
ments I find is very noticeable and in certain cases 
appears to act as a signal to the brain that the mo- 
ment of crossing the border of sleep is at hand. 

It would be interesting to compare with others our 
experience as to the increase in sensitiveness of the 
sense of smell. If a grain of something like spice 
or camphor be put under the pillow, or if a rose- 
leaf or two be left upon it, I find that scent will ap- 

150 



BORDERLAND STATE 151 

parently intensify just before we sleep and when we 
wake. Three or four tiny grains from a spike of 
lavender will at such moments produce the effect of 
a concentrated lavender essence, and a scent so deli- 
cate that it would pass almost unperceived by day 
acquires at these times a powerful fragrance. We 
become, in fact, like the Princess in the fairy story 
who, when she lay down to sleep, was able to detect 
the presence of a pea hidden beneath the seven mat- 
tresses on which she rested. It might possibly be 
worth while to make more carefully planned and re- 
corded experiments with regard to this heightened 
sensitiveness of the faculties of sight, hearing, and 
smell in this condition. That this special sensitive- 
ness to these sense impressions does not in my own 
experience continue in the actual dream state has 
already been pointed out. 1 It affects us up to the 
moment when we come to the border of sleep, but in 
my experience it never crosses that border-line. 

Of all our borderland experiences perhaps none 
are more attractive or more closely related to our 
dreams than the curious visions that sometimes pre- 
sent themselves to the mind when the will is in sus- 
pension, but whilst we are still more awake than 
asleep. These visions are so often referred to in 
books that they are evidently a common experience, 
although to different people they seem to come in 
very different forms, and with varying degrees of 
clearness and intensity. To me they come when, 
having been in bed, quietly resting for some little 

i Chapter X, "Sense Impressions in Dreams." 



152 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

time, my attention is arrested by seeing in front of 
me, as though between the rifts of a slowly unrolling 
cloud, a picture, which, as I watch it, changes and 
shifts. I believe that faces are often seen in this 
way, but the pictures that I see are seldom faces, 
they are generally landscape pictures with figures 
slowly moving across them. They represent places 
that I have never seen, although they are sometimes 
more or less like places that are known to me. 
These moving pictures dissolve and change, giving 
place to others which also come and go. They are 
apparently independent of any effort of imagina- 
tion; their appearance is always rather a surprise, 
and I am totally unable to guess when or in what 
form they will come, or what the "picture on the 
screen" will change into. 

The figures that are seen in these pictures move 
very slowly, and the effect is somewhat like the ' ' dis- 
solving views ' ' which used to be shown at the ' ' Poly- 
technic " when I was a child, combined with the 
movement of the cinematograph of to-day, but al- 
ways as though it were seen through a gap in a cur- 
tain of misty cloud which is partly drawn aside. 
M. Maury, a French writer on dreams in the last 
century, wrote at some length about these visions, 
which he looked upon as actually part of the ma- 
terial from which our dreams are made, precursors 
of the dreams which fill the mind when we are quite 
asleep. The visions which he describes were gen- 
erally of faces seen in the dark. Sir Francis Galton 
also described similar "visions of sane persons" 



BORDERLAND STATE 153 

experienced in the twilight time between sleeping 
and waking, having all the appearance of external 
objects, but which were not produced by any con- 
scious effort of memory or imagination. Dream 
faces seem from most recorded accounts to be the ob- 
jects that are the most frequently seen in these 
borderland visions. 

Mr. Frederick Greenwood, in his book on dreams, 
describes vividly the faces that he was in the habit 
of seeing in this way: "Always of a distinctive 
character, these visionary faces are like none that 
can be remembered as seen in life or in pictures ; in- 
deed, one of their most constant and most remark- 
able characteristics is their amazing unlikeness . . . 
they strike the view as strangely strange, surpris- 
ingly original and above all, intensely meaning" 
. . . "In all likelihood," he adds, "Blake's visions 
were some such phantoms as these, presented to his 
eyes in broad daylight." It should be noted that 
these borderland visions, whether of shifting land- 
scapes or phantom faces, are wholly different in 
character and origin from the mental pictures which 
a trained memory enables us to call up by a definite 
act of will. The power of recalling scenes and vis- 
ualising them is one of the best gifts that memory 
bestows on us, and few things give us greater pleas- 
ure than those recollections, which, like the poet's 
memory of daffodils, "flash upon the inward eye 
which is the bliss of solitude." 

But borderland visions are far clearer and sharper 
than these; they are actually pictures which seem 



154 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

to be external to ourselves and which we look at; 
not pictures which are simply remembered. More- 
over, it is the essential nature of these "visions" 
that no exertion of will can summon them at our 
pleasure, and that, as far as we can tell, they are 
wholly independent of our control, and not con- 
sciously dependent upon memory. Otherwise no 
special interest attaches to them, and apart from mo- 
ments of pleasure that they give us they might not 
be worth even a passing reference, if it were not that 
they seem to be fashioned very much after the man- 
ner that dreams are fashioned, and apparently come 
from the same source as that which provides the 
materials and pictures of our dreams. 

Another problem which might well be examined by 
the student of dreams is one which we all at times 
tried to solve for ourselves: where does the actual 
border-line lie? For we never know the moment 
when we cross over it, or even the moments when 
we approach it most nearly. In childhood, and long- 
after childhood ended, most of us have tried very 
hard, but tried in vain, to keep a watch so vigilant, 
as we approached the border, that we should know 
the moment of our crossing it. 

It is indeed strangely tantalising that this mystery 
of sleep should happen nightly, without our getting 
any nearer to a consciousness of its actual oncom- 
ing. Every night our normal mind abdicates its 
power, and the dream mind comes to its own, waking 
into activity, and taking the reins into its own hands. 
But the moment of that mysterious transition is al- 



BORDERLAND STATE 155 

ways effectively veiled from us. The nearest I have 
ever been able to get to a realisation of it has been 
when I have been reading rather late into the night. 
Sleep is approaching; the dream mind has already 
started on its activities and has set in motion a train 
of thought or dream story. The page of the book 
that I am reading still lies open before my eyes, and 
though it is becoming rather indistinct, it has not 
yet wholly gone from my sight; my mind is fast 
''losing hold," but I am not yet asleep. Suddenly, 
as though it were in the middle of the printed page, 
I read a sentence which does not belong there at all, 
an alien sentence wholly disconnected from the sub- 
ject or sense of the book. To what does this be- 
long? I am conscious that it has come from else- 
where, that it was part of a definite sequence of ideas 
or story which was being carried on on another 
"floor" of my mind, by another part of my brain. 
This story or thread of ideas was interrupted by the 
normal mind momentarily resuming its functions 
and supremacy. The two quite different strains of 
thought which were being carried on simultaneously 
have crossed each other, and I am for the moment 
aware of both. One night when this occurred, the 
book I was reading lay at a little angle to my eyes 
and I noticed that, whilst this made the lines of the 
printed page slope upwards from left to right, the 
interposed alien sentence seemed to be written at an 
obtuse angle to these, cutting diagonally across the 
printed lines. "It is like a weaver's warp and 
woof," I thought; and this is indeed the truest im- 



156 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

iage that can be made of these interwoven and cross- 
ing strands of thought. Instances of such inter- 
weaving could be multiplied indefinitely by anyone 
sufficiently interested to make note of them at once, 
but the memory of the interposed idea is so evan- 
escent that it fades away with extreme quickness and 
cannot be recalled. Drifting slowly towards sleep 
one night I was thinking over some public work that 
had taken up all the time and energy of the day. 
Suddenly across these thoughts there "came 
through" a clear-cut sentence belonging to a wholly 
different set of ideas, intercepted — as a scrap of a 
conversation is overheard on the telephone, or a por- 
tion of an alien "wireless" message is "tapped" 
by a Marconi operator. The intercepted fragment 
ran thus: "Haunted by the pirate ship." For one 
instant before the memory of it faded out I remem- 
bered the context that this belonged to; I remem- 
bered a ship with sails. I knew that it was some- 
how connected with piracy on the high seas, and that 
the story had to do with ships engaged in the oil- 
carrying trade, but the memory of it all faded away 
almost instantaneously, as indeed always happens; 
only the words of the intruding sentence remaining 
for a little while printed on my mind. 

Another similar note was made at about the same 
hour of the night. My mind had been dwelling on 
the anxieties of the war and on certain war work 
that was occupying me. The words that "came 
through" were as remote as they well could be from 
these thoughts; they were — "newly fledged birds on 



BORDERLAND STATE 157 

a tree — all grey," and with these words, just for one 
brief second, the picture they referred to also came 
back. I remembered a row of very tiny birds 
perched on a grey bough — "not a tree," I said to 
myself, "it was a bough only." They were small 
fluffed-out things, their breasts ruffled by a little 
gust of wind which disturbed the downy feathers, 
making little waves like the waves that the wind 
makes when lightly blowing over grass. "All grey 
and white," I thought, "and the bough grey too." 
And then I realised that all this was an intercepted 
bit, taken out of quite a different train of thought, 
and that the context to which the words and the grey 
picture belonged had wholly disappeared. 

It is probably true that, not only in the twilight 
time between sleeping and waking, but also by day, 
the mind and the subconscious mind are often at 
work simultaneously on different trains of thought; 
but if this be the case the normal mind is generally 
so dominant that no message can penetrate through 
to interrupt it; and only at times, when a drowsy 
condition causes it to lose its grip and mastery, can 
the working of the subconscious mind be perceived. 
The rare moments when we thus become aware of 
this duplicate working may have a certain value in 
the study of dreams, and we have to glean what we 
can from them, for the difficulty of tracing dream 
origins is great, and the sources of our knowledge 
about the dream mind are so limited that we can- 
not afford to disregard any clue that may give us 
further insight into them. 



158 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

There are, for instance, many dreams whose cen- 
tral idea is gathered from a book, generally a book 
that has lately been read, or that we are reading at 
the time. The book, like everything else that the 
dream mind makes use of, will be completely meta- 
morphosed ; but some leading idea or some character 
taken from it will be carried on into the dream. It 
is sometimes possible to study the actual process by 
which this is effected in the state where waking and 
sleeping shade into one another. 

I was reading late at night one of Arnold Ben- 
nett's chronicles of English midland life, and as I 
read sleep must have approached. Between sleep- 
ing and waking my mind wandered from the book, 
and a new and different story superimposed itself 
and ousted the other. The hero of the book re- 
mained the principal actor ; his name and character- 
istics were unchanged, but he was placed in an en- 
tirely new setting. A wild and unsettled prairie 
country with steeply undulating outlines now made 
the background of his adventures. Great caves with 
ramifying passages sheltered a group of men — pur- 
sued or pursuing — against whom he was pitted in a 
fierce but unequal struggle. I took no part person- 
ally in the drama, but was following it step by step, 
when the thread of it broke suddenly. The light in 
the room seemed to grow brighter; my eyes still 
rested on the open page where the hero's name lay 
before me. For the moment the prairie setting was 
so much more present to me than the scenery of the 
''Five Towns" that I could not convince myself 



BORDERLAND STATE 159 

quickly that it was not to be found in the book at all 
and was simply the creation of the dream mind, al- 
though sleep had not actually closed my eyes. The 
intensification of light had acted, as it so often does, 
as a warning signal just when the moment of true 
sleep was approaching, and the story that belonged 
to the borderland of dreams was brought to an 
abrupt close. 

Now, these methods of the dream mind, the quali- 
ties of its imagination, its habit of seizing upon part 
of an argument or part of a story to weave into 
something new and strange, all these are quite un- 
like the ways of the normal mind that is familiar to 
me by day. The difference in their methods of 
working is so sharply defined that I should seldom 
have to question which was the author of a particu- 
lar train of thought. They work differently and 
they arrive at different results; and herein lies un- 
doubtedly a great part of the unexpectedness and 
charm of the dream mind. We find in it something 
of the attraction that is to be found in friendship 
with one whose outlook is not quite like our own and 
who brings to it qualities of mind that delight us 
and that are not ours. 



CHAPTER XIII 

the actors in dreams 
"the dream guide" 

And yet, as angels in some brighter dreams 

Call to the soul when man doth sleep, 

So some strange thoughts transcend our wonted themes 

And into glory peep. 

— Henet Vaughan, "They Are All Gone." 

Who is the Guide who comes into so many of my 
dreams? Amongst the varied company of people 
who take their place in these dreams, this rather 
shadowy figure is by far the most persistent. 
Some among this company represent the friends of 
real life, some are composite portraits, blending the 
characteristics of more than one person ; whilst oth- 
ers are like the characters of the novelist and seem 
to be the inventions of the dreamer's mind. Of all 
these figures in my dreams, none takes so constant 
a part as the Guide. He seems always to stand close 
to me, always a little behind me. I take his pres- 
ence so entirely for granted, that when he speaks 
I do not turn round, or try to see him. I am not 
concerned, in my dreams, to question who he is ; or 
how or why he is possessed of such authority and 
knowledge. His wisdom always apparently tran- 
scends that possessed by my dream mind; and he 

160 



THE ACTORS IN DREAMS 161 

tells me things which in my dreams I do not know. 
Sometimes he jests, often he laughs; sometimes he 
laughs at me. Because I have known his judgment 
to be profounder than my own, he has in certain 
dreams, calmed my excitement and my fears. In 
one or two dreams, but not often, I have believed 
that the Guide's presence was that of a divine mes- 
senger; for it has seemed in these dreams that he 
had a wisdom beyond the wisdom belonging to men. 
Like all dream students, I have sought to find an 
answer to the riddle that meets us as soon as we be- 
gin to think about dreams — Whence do the actors 
in our dreams come ? If they are the creation of the 
dream mind alone, how is it that they are able to 
play all these different parts, and to carry on the 
dialogue and arguments that they sustain so well? 

And, as the Guide enters so constantly into my 
dream life, these questions have naturally turned 
upon his personality and origin, and I have asked, 
Whence does the wisdom of the Guide come? And 
can he be really the product of my own mind? 

Confronted by a similar problem, one writer has 
advanced the theory that the dramatis personae in 
such dreams must come from a source extraneous to 
the dreamer, since there is no reason why surprise 
should be experienced if our own mind is the source 
of the dream content. I should like to believe in 
this theory, and to feel that the Guide and other 
dream personalities come from a source external to 
myself ; but I cannot feel any conviction of this ; it 
seems more in harmony with all dream experience to 



162 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

conclude that everything that is contained in dreams 
— the dream rooms and the dream country in which 
they take place, as well as the actors in them — are 
alike the invention of the dreamer 's mind. 

The wisdom displayed by the Guide, the singular 
quality of illumination that in dreams he seems to 
possess, may probably be explained by the height- 
ened powers of the faculty of imagination in the 
dream and borderland states, to which frequent ref- 
erence is made in this book. But though this may 
help to explain the Guide 's wisdom, the explanation 
does not carry us very far. It is still very difficult 
to conceive the process by which the personages who 
play their parts on the stage of our dreams are cre- 
ated, and are able to sustain their widely different 
and consistent roles. 

Certain dream experiences may possibly throw a 
little light on what is a very difficult problem. 
There are some dreams in which it seems as though 
two "selves," or two " minds" were at work at the 
same time, playing different parts, and bringing to 
their respective parts different mental character- 
istics. In certain of these dreams we are actually 
conscious of being present ourselves, in a dual ca- 
pacity, and of acting in them as D — the dreamer — 
and as S — myself. (It is thus that I am obliged in 
making notes of these dreams to distinguish between 
the two roles, both of which "I" fill.) 

The following note gives an example of such a 
dream, and illustrates the double part which the 
dreamer fills in them. This particular dream took 



THE ACTORS IN DREAMS 163 

place near the point of waking, but similar dreams 
take place at different periods of sleep. In two 
successive dreams of rather disordered sleep I was 
preoccupied by the same absurd but nightmareish 
worry. I thought that certain household posses- 
sions, some fine pieces of brocade, and silk curtains, 
had been left out of doors, and had been found in the 
rain and melting snow. The care of getting these 
things dried and restored became an obsession which 
distracted my dream imagination. In the second 
part of the dream, when the trouble had become 
acute, and when I was presumably near to the point 
of waking, I not only took part as the dreamer, but 
was present in a double capacity; for ''I" inter- 
rupted the dream, and argued sternly with the 
dreamer as to the reality of the trouble that was so 
oppressive. "I" said, "This is a dream — I am cer- 
tain of it; you must wake." But the dreamer re- 
plied, "It cannot simply be a dream, because it was 
not only in this dream, but in the dream before this 
one that I discovered these things in the snow; it 
must be real, or it would not happen twice, and here 
are the actual things which you can see and touch 
for yourself. " "I" was very puzzled, and said that 
"I" could not answer this, or explain it properly; 
it did indeed seem very real even to me, and very 
confusing. "I" examined the soiled materials 
again ; they felt very wet and dripping in my hands 
and seemed to be convincingly ' ' real. ,r " Perhaps, ' ' 
I thought, "some of the seeming facts are really 
true" — I could not disentangle them from what was 



164 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

false; only "I" felt sure that a great deal of the 
worry was " dream trouble, not day trouble." 
"No," the dreamer argued again, "for you can see 
and feel the wet things — they are too real to be 
'dream things.' " "Well," "I" said at last, "will 
you put it to the touch, and test it? Wake," "I" 
said, "and see just how much of this is a dream!" 
And I woke. 

In such a dream as this, we are aware of two 
streams of consciousness, both part of ourselves. 
It seems as though two factors of a dual conscious- 
ness were both actively present, and as though for 
the moment we were conscious of two "selves," a 
dream "self" and a normal "self," which when we 
sleep is subconscious to the dream mind, which seeks 
to interfere and to bring in will-power to control, 
and reason to guide, the dream imagination. 

I suppose that whenever the formula for stopping 
or changing a dream is made use of, some such in- 
terference with the operation of the dream mind 
really takes place, and that this interference is the 
secret of dream control. 

There are often moments in the transition time 
between waking and sleeping when we may become 
suddenly aware that both the normal mind and the 
dream mind are at work simultaneously. 1 But in 
these moments in the borderland state the two op- 
erate independently. Two strains of thought cross 
each other, we may become aware of both, but they 
move on separate lines. When, however, the bor- 

iCf. Chapter XII, "Borderland State." 



THE ACTORS IN DREAMS 165 

der-line of sleep lias been crossed, it is different. 
When the normal mind, by whatever name we desig- 
nate this primary self, enters the province that be- 
longs to the dream mind and interferes in it (as it 
appears at times to do), it seems to act co-oper- 
atively, bringing suggestions from without, and im- 
porting memories, knowledge of facts, and trains of 
reasoning, to supplement the imperfect argument 
and reasoning of the dream. The reasoning thus 
supplied appears to us in our dreams to come from 
outside ourselves and to be the more remarkable and 
convincing. It is only in a few dreams, such as that 
which has been quoted above, that we are conscious 
of our dual capacity, and are aware that we are tak- 
ing the parts both of the "dreamer" and of the other 
actor ; both being, in fact, our very selves. In most 
dreams I imagine that a similar process is carried 
out, but without our being aware of it. In the 
dreams which centre round the Guide, I am never 
conscious of this division of personality. The 
Guide does not seem to be myself, but neither do his 
moral sense and outlook appear to be essentially dif- 
ferent from those which are mine by day or those 
which I aspire to. Although in my dreams I feel 
him to be possessed of gifts of wisdom belonging to 
a higher plane than my own, there is fundamental 
harmony between his ideas and my own waking 
thoughts. Again, when I analyse the knowledge 
that he imparts in dreams I see that it comes from 
sources which are at my command by day, though 
he often recalls things to my memory which I have 



166 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

totally forgotten. He seems to me always to be 
more imaginative than myself, and often suggests a 
train of thought or literary allusion that I have dif- 
ficulty in tracing. 

To give an illustration of the part that the Guide 
takes in certain dreams I have given here two notes 
of such dreams. In the first of these the Guide 
seemed to me in the dream to be a divine messenger. 
It is one of the few dreams in which I have not taken 
his presence for granted, and in which I have ques- 
tioned his origin and the source of his authority. 
In this dream "I was in a very broad street leading 
down to the Thames Embankment and was looking 
out at the river and sky beyond. The Guide was 
standing just behind me ; our hearts were filled with 
anxiety for the country because of the war, and we 
were watching there to see what was about to hap- 
pen. As I watched, I saw on the roadway and tram- 
lines of the Embankment a number of open military 
wagons coming up filled with men, and gazing at 
them, I saw to my horror that they were not our own 
khaki-clad men, but strange soldiers dressed in black 
with a touch of red on their helmets. 'They are 
Austrians or Germans,' I exclaimed, and, with the 
thought that the enemy was here, the bitterness of 
despair seemed to overwhelm me; all that French 
women were feeling and suffering would now, I 
thought, be felt and suffered by ourselves, but the 
Guide, speaking very low, almost in a whisper, bade 
me take comfort and look again. ' These are not 
Germans or Austrians,' he said, 'but soldiers of the 



THE ACTORS IN DREAMS 167 

Allies ; and see, in the wagons behind them there are 
English soldiers!' 

' ' The relief was so great that the tears ran down 
my face, and I stooped down and kissed the English 
earth. 'But the enemy must be very near,' I 
thought, ' or all these troops would not be here to de- 
fend London,' and for the first time in my life, I, 
who have always been so glad and thankful for my 
womanhood, felt that it was hard to have been born 
a woman — unable to defend my country for which 
such a passion of love had sprung up in my heart. 
' Oh, why was I not made a man, so that I could have 
been a soldier now!' I cried, and the Guide an- 
swered, 'Is that very grateful to Me — you who have 
borne four sons to serve England — are you not un- 
grateful?' And I knew that indeed he was right. 
And then a question about the Guide himself flashed 
through my mind. 'Who are you,' I thought. 
'Are you my father that you speak like this — are you 
God who made me? Are you a Spirit? Who are 
you?' I thought the Guide laughed very gently, 
and I turned round quickly, but there was no one 
there that I could see. ' Oh, where are you ? ' I 
cried, for a sort of panic seized me that he had al- 
together gone, or that he might be hurt in the strife 
that I thought was surely coming. 'Oh, come!' I 
called, ' out of this broad street, where there may be 
fighting soon — it isn't safe here!' and then in a mo- 
ment it struck me what a comedy it was that I should 
be so distressed, and in such great fear for the 
Guide's safety and not for my own, knowing as I 



168 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

did in my heart that he was one whom the enemy had 
no power to harm at all. 

"I stood alone now in the wide empty road, and 
looked at the tall houses on either side of it. The 
people living in these houses had clambered out on 
to the roofs to look at the troops, and to see what 
would happen. One man seemed to be waving his 
arms. I thought he might be a spy — or at any rate 
that he and others ran a great chance of being 
treated as such — so I called to them as loudly as I 
could to leave their roofs and go into safety; warn- 
ing them that if they appeared to be signalling to the 
enemy, they would be in the gravest danger. I 
shouted to them, and I persuaded them to go indoors, 
but I could not help laughing as I watched one stout 
woman making her way with difficulty back into 
safety through her attic window. I turned then 
into a narrow side street, and passed through an 
archway into one of the houses." 

In another dream the Guide had been the witness 
of the scene he described, and his story was so vivid 
that I still feel as if I had seen it with my own eyes 
and had not simply heard it told in a dream. 

I had been re-reading Swinburne's "Poems and 
Ballads," and reading Mr. Gosse's "Life of Swin- 
burne"; and by a natural transition my mind had 
wandered away at times to Shelley. That night 
"my dream was of Swinburne's death. The Guide 
who was with me had himself seen the end ; and he 
told me how the poet had died. Death had come to 



THE ACTORS IN DREAMS 169 

him, the Guide said, in the midst of war, in a battle- 
plane high over the fields of France. He felt snre 
that a bullet had struck the poet; but almost at the 
same moment the plane had fallen, diving down- 
wards in flames, burning very fiercely. As he de- 
scribed it he made me see vividly the very scene, 
and the little bright flames against the sky licking 
up to the burning wings of the plane as it fell. 
'And so,' the Guide said — and his words ran in a 
sort of chant — 'Swinburne was happy, as Shelley 
was happy in his death — Sea and Fire for the one — 
death above the clouds for the other, a soaring death, 
and for them both at last Fire. ' ' ' 

The dream passed on to other scenes of war in 
France. Waking from it, it was hard to believe that 
it was not real, that things had not happened so; 
and hours afterwards, when I copied out the rough 
shorthand note of the early morning, it seemed 
easier to believe in the story as it was told to me than 
to believe in the end that history records — "the mo- 
tionless existence of the little old genius, and his lit- 
tle old acolyte, in their dull little villa" at Putney. 1 

If it is sometimes hard to believe that the actors 
who take part in these dreams come, not from with- 
out, but from within our own consciousness, the be- 
lief is even harder in the case of dreams which seem 
to give back to us for a little while the presence of 
those whom we have loved, and who are parted from 
us. They may come to us in "clear dream and sol- 

i E. Gosse, "Life of Swinburne." 



170 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

eniii vision" — we do not question how they come; 
their presence seems for the moment as real as the 
comfort that they bring. 

Come to me in my dreams and then 
By day I shall be well again; 
For then the night will more than pay 
The hopeless longing of the day. 1 

There must be many who have sorrowed, who have 
found with the wise physician that "there is a nearer 
apprehension of anything that delights us in our 
dreams than in our waked senses; without this I 
were unhappy; for my awaked judgment discon-. 
tents me, ever whispering unto me that I am from 
my friend; but my friendly dreams in the night re- 
quite me, and make me think I am within his 
arms." 2 

The unhappy, the desolate, may still find in 
dreams, and only in dreams, the "certain knot of 
peace, the balm of woe" that Sir Philip Sidney 
found in them, when he had fallen on evil days, and 
when grief and disappointment had become familiar 
to him. In dreams the sorrowful may find the place 
that they seek, where pain is stilled, and where for a 
little while love may revisit them. And having 
found it, they long for a spell which would summon 
these "friendly dreams" more often. But these are 
just the dreams which elude our spells, and over 
which the simple rules of dream control that I know 

i Matthew Arnold. 

2 Sir Thomas Browne. ' ■ 



THE ACTORS IN DREAMS 171 

have no power. Other dreams tend to become more 
and more obedient to the will, but the power of volun- 
tary dreaming stops short here, and the dreamer 
has, I believe, little power to call up the dreams that 
would bring him the greatest comfort. They will 
come, but not at our bidding; we can only await 
them, and be grateful for their coming, and for the 
transient solace that they bring. 

But dear and welcome as these dreams are, vivid 
as they may be, I have never felt about them the 
conviction that I feel about somewhat similar experi- 
ences occurring in the transition time between wak- 
ing and sleeping and waking — the certainty that they 
come from " without," not from "within"; the con- 
fident sense of the presence of one known to me who, 
though unseen, is able to communicate clearly and 
directly with me by channels other than the ordi- 
nary channels of sense. Even the most convincing 
of dreams seem to me to belong to a different plane 
of experience from this. It is possible that the 
psychologist may say that he does not recognise 
such a distinction between mental phenomena on the 
hither side of sleep and those occurring after its 
borderland has been crossed. I do not know — the 
question is full of difficulty — but personally I feel 
assured that the experiences that I am familiar with 
in the earlier stage of the borderland state are ac- 
tually of a very different order from any dreams 
that I have known. Of the dreams of which I have 
spoken, I am content to believe that love co-operates 
with memory, and memory with imagination, in ere- 



172 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

ating them; and, like Sir Thomas Browne, "I do 
thank God for my happy dreams, as I do for my 
good rest, for there is a satisfaction in them unto 
reasonable desires and such as can be content with 
a fit of happiness." 1 

i Sir Thomas Browne, "Eeligio Medici." 



XIV 

MORAL, SENSE IN DREAMS 

Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, 
whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, what- 
soever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; 
if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these 
things. — Philippians, iv, 8. 

It is an interesting question how far our moral 
sense in dreams corresponds to the moral sense of 
our normal life. Our moral sense and moral char- 
acter have come to us partly by inheritance, and 
have been modified by training, by the discipline 
of life, and by the teaching of religion. They have 
become essential factors of our selves. How far do 
these moral characteristics survive unchanged in 
the world of dreams! 

There are some great differences in the way in 
which we regard things in dreams. Most dreamers 
will agree with me that one of these differences lies 
in the absence from the dream mind of any deep 
sense of responsibility. It is to this freedom from 
the cares of responsibility that a great part of the 
sense of pleasure in dreams is due ; we have the free- 
dom that a child has from the sense of responsi- 
bility and duty that rules the activities of our life 
by day, and this characteristic of the dream state 

173 



174 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

naturally affects to a certain extent the character of 
our moral sense in it. There are other very marked 
differences in the moral sense in the two states. 

Great stress is laid by the Freudian school on the 
recognised fact that we may find ourselves con- 
fronted in dreams by thoughts and expressions of 
emotion that we do not choose to admit to our 
thoughts in our waking life; ideas which are ban- 
ished more or less instinctively from our minds. 
The teachers of this school insist that the repres- 
sion of these conceptions by day drives these un- 
desirable conceptions into the unconscious mind, 
whence they will find expression in dreams and will 
operate in them with greatly increased power. No 
one will deny the fact that natural emotions which 
are unduly repressed are apt to take their revenge 
by poisoning the mind. We have only to read of 
the results of such repression in the case of the her- 
mits and recluses of old to see how bad, both for the 
normal and the dream life, such unnatural repres- 
sion of man's ordinary instincts and emotions can 
be. I feel sure, however, that the amplifications 
and illustrations of this theory by Freud, and by the 
psycho-analysts who follow in his steps, are only 
partially true, and may be very misleading. They 
proceed on the assumption that the inhibition or re- 
pression of thoughts by day gives to such thoughts 
a greater power over the dream mind, and that, no 
matter how completely they are controlled by day, 
they cannot be controlled in our dreams. It would 
follow from this argument that there is a field of 



MORAL SENSE IN DREAMS 175 

mental experience which is wholly removed from the 
control of the moral sense. 

I believe that the theory and practice of dream 
control furnish an answer to this argument. All 
that I would say here is that we need not necessarily 
give up the direction of our dreams in this way. If 
dreams visit us that we do not welcome, or that we 
do not choose should intrude upon us, a simple rule 
will free us from them, if we are sufficiently deter- 
mined about the matter. It is after all a matter of 
will. To forbid, and prevent the recurrence of, an 
undesired dream is a comparatively easy task, by 
methods that have been described in Chapter I of 
this book. In order to give an example of this I 
have taken from my notes some that relate to 
"dreams of anger." 

A sense of anger, which I have very rarely felt by 
day, used at times to enter into my dreams as an 
emotion more violent of its kind than I ever remem- 
ber having felt in my waking life. The occasion 
was generally some very trivial one, which excited, 
however, an unnatural degree of passion in my 
dream mind. These dreams suggested an experi- 
ment in dream control which I carried out. Here- 
after, when the sensation of anger came into a 
dream, it brought automatically with it the associ- 
ated memory of the formula by which I arrest a 
dream's course, and control was thus established. 
In such a dream which I recorded I had become very 
angry — so angry that I wished to strike the offend- 
ing person who had aroused my wrath. At this mo- 



176 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

ment the formula interposed itself, and I knew that 
this was a dream, and realised that it was "dream 
anger" that I felt. A reflected memory of the de- 
scription given by Mr. Havelock Ellis of inhibition 
of the power of movement in dreams flashed at the 
same time into the dream mind. "If this is only a 
dream and only dream anger," I said to myself, 
"you will have no power to strike." The muscular 
power that I had been conscious of possessing an 
instant before, and that I had been ready to use, 
was indeed no longer mine. "Yes," I thought, 
"then it must be really a dream, and really dream 
anger"; and I awoke. 

When the nature of these dreams had been fully 
recognised they tended to occur less and less often. 
I think that the recognition acted as a warning that 
the impulse of foolish wrath was latent in my mind, 
and must be watched and controlled by day as well 
as by night. I am convinced that if we recognise 
frankly an impulse that our moral sense condemns, 
such as violent anger, jealousy, or any other passion 
which belongs to the baser side of our nature, and 
which offends our moral sense, the control of such 
impulse by day tends in course of time to eliminate 
it from our dreams. 

There will, however, still be dreams that may 
trouble us with suggestions of lower emotions and 
passions, which do not consciously form a part of 
our normal thought, or which have been eliminated 
from it — the "repressed thoughts" that the teaching 
of Freud has explained. Children growing up are 



MORAL SENSE IN DREAMS 177 

often startled by experiencing in dreams emotions, 
the origin and meaning of which are unknown to 
them; and, long after childhood and adolescence are 
passed, dreams of emotions which would not be ad- 
mitted to normal consciousness may be experienced. 
It is well to face all the facts about our nature ; an 
ostrich-like attitude towards them will only leave us 
ignorant and defenceless. Recognition of these 
facts gives us increased power over our emotions 
and increased assurance in dealing with their mani- 
festations both in the normal and in the dream life. 
What our thoughts are by day we can more or less 
decide; we need never be at the mercy of chance 
thoughts, unless we have abandoned the steering 
wheel by which the course of the mind is guided. It 
is too often assumed that whereas we can thus direct 
the activity of the normal mind, we are at the mercy 
of any emotion or passion in our dreams. I am 
sure that this is not really the case. 

Teachers of every age and creed, from St. Paul 
and St. Augustine to Professor William James, have 
taught in varying language the same lesson — that 
the impulses and passions of men may be controlled 
by their will, that base thoughts may be inhibited, 
driven out by the substitution of nobler ideas. Such 
repression of base thoughts and such direction of 
the mind into other channels tends to give us not 
only the guidance of our thoughts by day, but helps 
also to decide the nature of our dreams. And even 
if from time to time unwelcome thoughts, that be- 
long to a lower side of our nature, should reappear, 



178 STUDIES IN DREAMS 

we need not be too much troubled, nor think that the 
province of dreams lies wholly beyond our control. 

We may, if we will, achieve a substantial harmony 
between these two mental provinces; between our 
thoughts and actions by day, and our thoughts and 
actions in dreams, and in a complete and ordered life 
the two states would tend to approach each other 
more nearly. Characteristic differences there will 
always be between them ; but these differences would 
lie, not in a violent antithesis of moral sense, but in 
such differences as exist between two persons who, 
differing from each other in many ways, have never- 
theless much in common and who agree in the essen- 
tials of outlook and conduct. 

It is only when dreams of terror, dreams of grief, 
and dreams of evil have ceased to have power over 
us that we are able thoroughly to enjoy our dream 
life ; for it is only then that we are able to embark 
with entire confidence on the nightly adventure of 
our dreams, and to explore the unknown and de- 
lightful country to which they lend us the key. 



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